Shares of companies that supply optical interconnects shot higher on Tuesday after Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang made a surprise appearance during Marvell's Computex 2026 keynote in Taipei and articulated a clear ordering for how data-center connectivity should evolve as AI workloads expand.
Market moves were pronounced. Coherent Inc (NYSE:COHR) climbed 17.3% to $425.59, Lumentum Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LITE) rose 13.3% to $1,025, Corning (NYSE:GLW) advanced nearly 12% to $197.88, and Ciena Corp (NYSE:CIEN) gained more than 8% to $616.46. Marvell shares rallied roughly 23% after comments made at the same event.
Huang framed the transition in practical, capacity-focused terms. As he put it: "We should use copper as much as we can, for as long as we can, but copper has its limits. The right strategy is to scale up with copper as long as you can - after that you scale up further with optics, you scale out with optics and you scale across with optics. So you use optics wherever you must, you use copper wherever you can."
Marvell CEO Matt Murphy echoed the structural implication, saying the "copper boundary" is moving inward toward the rack, which, in his view, creates imminent demand for optical interconnects and co-packaged optics (CPO) as AI workloads scale.
The comments were layered on top of a pattern of capital deployment by Nvidia over the prior three months. The company has committed at least $6.5 billion to photonics-related firms in that period, including $2 billion investments each in Lumentum and Coherent, a $500 million stake in Corning aimed at advanced optical connectivity, and participation in Ayar Labs' $500 million funding round. The scale of those commitments underlines the strategic logic Huang described at Computex.
Photonics technologies move data as pulses of light rather than electrical signals, a distinction that matters for speed and energy efficiency as GPU-to-GPU traffic increases across hyperscale AI clusters. That technical advantage is a central part of the reasoning investors are applying to price optical suppliers more richly.
Optical names had already been among 2026's top performers heading into Tuesday, with Lumentum, Corning and Ciena having more than doubled year-to-date, according to Moomoo. The Computex remarks amplified the existing bullish backdrop, helping to accelerate the intraday moves.
Institutional research momentum has also been shifting. Bank of America recently raised price targets on both Cisco and Ciena, citing what the bank characterized as an accelerating AI optics cycle - a dynamic that Huang's public remarks at Marvell's keynote seemed to validate in investors' eyes.
Taken together, the sequence of executive statements, capital commitments and analyst repositioning has driven rapid re-pricing of companies tied to optical interconnects. For market participants and technology planners alike, the immediate impact is visible in equity performance; for infrastructure teams, the comments reinforce a staged approach to interconnect architecture that prioritizes copper where it suffices and deploys optics where copper cannot scale.
While the market reaction was swift, the underlying narrative presented at Computex is specific and bounded: a copper-first, optics-when-needed strategy coupled with significant recent capital allocation by a major AI platform provider. How that narrative unfolds in procurement cycles, product road maps and broader capex remains to be observed in future quarters.
Sectors impacted: Data-center hardware and interconnect suppliers, photonics and optical components, semiconductors and AI infrastructure.