Welcome everyone back to DB's 20th Annual Tech Conference. My name is Gianmarco Conti. I am heading the hardware equity research team here at DB. Today we have the pleasure of hosting Michael Hurlston, CEO of Lumentum. Michael, I want you to open as wide as possible. For 50 years, the story of computing has been the chip, and connecting the chip was an afterthought. Optics has forever been the technology of the future. 25 years later, we are in the largest infrastructure build-out in history, and the bottleneck has shifted from the chip to the connectivity. My question is straightforward. Let us just set the stage for everyone. What fundamentally changed? Why is light winning? What makes this moment structurally different from the last time?
Yeah. First, Gianni, thanks for having me. Really a pleasure. Not too bad a setting, I must say.
Yeah, nice conference.
Not too bad. Look, what is happening right now is the speed that is required in these compute racks has gone up to a degree that copper cannot carry it over X distance. At 800G, the connection rate of, let us say, 800G, copper can carry 800G reliably, maybe 10 m. Now we are at 1.6T, copper can carry that maybe reliably 2 m- 3 m. There are many, many links inside a rack or inside a cluster inside a data center that are longer than 2 m- 3 m. As these speeds go up, you go from 800G to 1.6T, eventually we are going to go to 3.2T, the presence of copper and the technical aspects of copper become more and more difficult to make work.
We have always been, as you know, for going a reasonable distance inside the data center, has always been the purview of optics. It has been relatively small numbers because the distance is long. You are going from a compute rack out to scale-out switches, and that is hundreds of meters, let us say. You have always had scale-out optics where there are these transceivers, typically it has been, and optical transceivers have always been in there. What the new change has been is now you are seeing optics go inside clusters and then, more importantly, inside the rack itself. That is really what is driving the number. If you think about Lumentum, we have always been playing in scale across, right? Connecting data centers to one another.
That number has gone crazy because the number of data centers has gone up, and the amount of connectivity you now need between data centers has gone up. Really, you are just beginning to see optics now come inside the rack and inside the cluster, and that is really what is driving our number and why many people have a pretty good growth rate ascribed to us.
That is a fair, nice view of the industry. Okay, maybe let us begin with OCS. I think it is quite the point of contention here. It is a great opportunity for Lumentum. I think it is fair to say that you are the only merchant supplier of OCS at scale. You are getting every call about it. Shipments have doubled sequentially, and you are expected to cross $100 million in OCS with revenue next quarter. My question is, how should an investor translate what you have done for Google with potentially expanding that expertise to many more customers seeking to implement OCS in scale-up topology?
Yeah, the first thing I would say is the breadth of customer engagement is very high on OCS. We started with customers other than Google. People are ascribing us to be shipping to Google. Google deploys a great number of OCSs in their topology, but we actually have customers that were much more substantial than Google in our early rounds of shipments. The breadth of customer discussion is significant, and probably one of the more interesting use cases is deploying an OCS inside the rack itself, being able to use one per rack to route around GPUs or TPUs that may be overloaded. You have a surprising amount of GPUs in a data center actually fail. When these fail and the compute model is $20 million, $30 million, $40 million of compute time, and you have something that gives out, that is a problem. Right?
Now there's a move to say, okay, how do we route around those GPUs, and how do we get to a point where a GPU might be overloaded and we can better route traffic? A great way to use an OCS is exactly in that application. Now, what I'd say, Gianni, is been very significant for us in that our largest customer has taken up their orders very significantly on us, really since our last earnings call. We've seen a huge uptick in our order book and the order rate. That actually gives us confidence to increase or give a new guidance, a new guidance for the company. That is that in 2028, we figure that we can now deliver $40 of earnings power.
A very, very significant number and a take-up, I think, against all the sell side analysts in terms of where we think our earnings power can be. That's now driven significantly on the back of OCS. The OCS numbers have come up a lot since our last earnings call, and that really gives us a lot of confidence, given the margin profile of that good, to substantially take up where we think our earnings power will be in 2028, in our fiscal 2028.
That's very clear. So what do you think the shape of OCS will look like in three years' time from now, from like an industry standpoint? Because, of course, you're sort of leading the whole edge. Do you think it's gaining faster pace than what the industry analysis actually sets it at?
Yeah, I think so. Kathy, who you work with rather closely, has given a TAM number. That TAM is $8 billion. We think that and we gave that at OFC last year. I think the TAM now looks like it's significantly under called. You have just such a rush toward finding ways to use OCS. OCS has significant power advantages relative to an electrical switch, significant loss advantages. The loss through the switch is far less than you'd see in an electrical switch. Those two together are stimulating a lot of discussions from the customer base around how to use it. I think as we look out in time, this, we think, will be one of the largest growth drivers in the company. Yes, we're predominantly today, I'd say, tied to one customer who's figured out a topology in which to use it and use it meaningfully.
Their numbers are growing very significantly. They are doing well in the market. The number of OCSs per torus is going up. All of those things are obviously very good for us, which is lending us to give this new target for 2028. Beyond that, the customer base is increasingly widening, and we are very excited. I think in the next OFC in March of next year, I am sure Kathy will put together a new set of numbers around that TAM, and I think they will be significantly up from the $8 billion that we have given previously.
That is incredible, yeah. I think some investors think of it as like a binary solution when they look at CPO as well, and it really isn't. You can kind of also stack it on top. So it just kind of exacerbates further, the whole push for implementing OCS. Okay, great. So, look, as we mentioned, revenue doubled year-over-year. You guided another 25% sequential step, and you hit your target operating model a quarter early. Where are we on this demand curve? Can you decompose it for us, scale out, scale across, and now the first signs of in-rack. Which of the three is the steepest from here, and which is the least appreciated in your view? It is a very broad question, but—
It is a really good question, and I appreciate it. I think first, what is the biggest? It is obviously CPO and NPO, and I would lump those two together. CPO and NPO have been used as an either/or. In a topology, it might be an either/or, but it can even be an and. I think we talked about this in our earnings call, where we see customers deploying CPO and NPO, all of which is additive.
So I think there has been this misnomer where CPO and NPO are somehow viewed as competitive, somehow viewed as taking away in some way to the optics industry. No, that is not true. We see these things as being completely additive to the numbers that we see today. Remember, if you look at the scale out, and scale out CPO is something that is fundamentally interesting for us because of the partnership with NVIDIA.
That is optics supplanting optics. It is just transforming one form of optics to another form. Scale up is all additive for the optics industry. Forget about Lumentum. It is all additive for the optics industry. So if you look at near term, that is the single biggest driver that we have, and we are just super excited because today, nothing is showing up in our number relative to either CPO or NPO. What is the least appreciated? That is the scale across. Our scale across business is quite high margin. It is growing rapidly, but nobody talks about it. Everybody wants to know what is happening inside the data center. Outside the data center is equally interesting for us and is equally important. You have a couple of phenomenon. These training sequences, training models are so big they cannot be contained within the four walls of one data center.
You have to have multiple data centers playing together to really run these compute models. Number two, you have this now dynamic around the politics of data centers.
Nobody wants these big gigawatt factories in their backyard, so the workaround has been, well, let's make smaller megawatt facilities and just have a lot of them scattered across a couple of kilometers in distance. That plays really well to our scale across business because you have to connect these data centers to one another using fiber. That's where our scale across business plays.
Yeah, it's very interesting. I actually heard that argument a lot in sessions between the whole geopolitic angle, like playing into the data center expansion. Okay, so look, you've described Lumentum as sitting at the heart of a secular shift from electrical to optical connectivity. The physics does most of the argument, of course. Every doubling of lane rates roughly halves copper's reach, and there is no visible electrical roadmap beyond 448G. Through this, at least. From where you sit with visibility into every architecture on the planet, is there any scenario left in which this transition stalls? What would it take?
I don't see a scenario in which this stalls out. Simply as you said in the question, it's physics, right? It's the physics and Kathy Ta, who's here with me today, describes this copper wall. Eventually, the physics of copper has resistive properties. It's got resistance to it. So it can only go over a certain distance, and as these speeds get ever higher, the distance over which an electrical signal can travel on copper gets smaller and smaller. You know as well as anybody, the number of links inside these racks that are longer than a meter, longer than 2 m is huge. So we're just going to see this shift, and it's not going to happen overnight, right?
You're not going to see copper go away tomorrow, but you're going to start seeing more and more optical links, and eventually, at some point, you're going to see the entire back plane of a server system be entirely optical. That's multiple years away. I think the interesting thing for the audience to understand is there's also now inside the trays themselves, you're getting the same phenomenon. These high bandwidth connections between multiple GPUs in a tray or between the GPU and high-bandwidth memory are such that it's also necessitating at least a discussion of optical connectivity. A new market that's emerging for us and it's opening up is now how do we get optics inside the tray itself and connect these very, very high bandwidth, but short reach that's always been the purview of electrical traces on a printed circuit board.
How do we get that to move toward optical? We are seeing that beginning to happen as well.
Feels like light is dominating pretty much everything at some point.
I wouldn't say dominating.
No.
That might be a—
It might be a bit too far fetched.
That might be a stretch, but—
No, that's true.
—look.
Transition is there, though.
Transitioning.
Yeah.
I think it's a transitioning statement. I think this is all new TAM. All of this is just incremental TAM, not just for us, but for the whole optical industry. We've always been a fairly small, sleepy cottage industry, and you started getting involved in covering it, and suddenly it looks pretty sexy.
It does. Let's double-click maybe into EML a little bit. The narrative treats EML as a component that simply sits inside the transceiver, but I think it's fair to argue that there are also yield components in the transceiver that ought to be considered, that can improve with higher quality lasers. So perhaps walk us through the laser economics of the lane speed transition. 200G is now over a quarter of your EML revenue. You previously flagged 300G per lane as the next milestone. You also flagged that 3.2T silicon photonics loses some of its advantages, and indeed, EML does come back in a meaningful way. So my question is, what does this arc do to ASP and mix?
Yeah, a lot to unpack in the question. It's a good question.
because there's a lot of range to it. First, 100G- 200G EML, you're seeing about a 2x uplift in price. As we go from 100 to 200, our ASPs are roughly doubling. As you see the market shifting from 800G to 1.6T, that's where you've got 200G lasers are coming in. It's coming in at the 1.6T node. Very good for us overall. At 200G, at the moment on 200G EMLs, very little competition. We don't see a lot of competitive threats on the horizon either. Broadcom is a supplier of 200G EMLs. We're the other large supplier of 200G EMLs. We don't see a lot of other folks entering that field anytime soon. I think the interesting thing is, at 1.6T, today, most of the transceivers are EML based, most of them.
But we have said, and I believe this to be true, that over time, you'll see the majority of transceivers be silicon photonics based, which does not necessitate the use of an EML. Cycle over cycle, 800G to 1.6T, we would expect the number of EMLs to go up, but the share to come down somewhat considerably. The share of EML-based transceivers at 800G is probably 70%-80%. We would expect the share of transceivers to be 40%-50% of the market at 1.6T. Raw numbers going up, share going down. At 3.2T, our best experts, our technical guys that make these transceivers say silicon photonics again runs out of steam. You'd see a comeback of the EML in its share. Again, it's too early to call the numbers.
We'd expect the numbers to continue to increase, so we're going to have a double whammy as we go to 3.2T, where both numbers and share end up going up. It's an interesting cycle. This seems to be a temporal issue relative to simple silicon photonics at this node, but we'd expect to see it come back at 3.2T.
It is very interesting indeed. Maybe following on from this, perhaps it is worth spending a few words on the Chinese CW laser entrance. Put simply, when and if supply normalizes, what keeps the premium? Is it narrow spec, high-power laser manufacturing, perhaps a process art that transfers slowly, or does this commoditize from the low power and upward?
Yeah, I missed it in your last question, which again, was really well framed. One of the advantages that we have that I think is underappreciated is the yields that we are able to generate for our customers. If you look at our EML on a price for price, we are certainly getting a higher price, but that more than makes up for itself in the high yields, where the tolerance of the laser sets the yield of the transceiver more than anything else. Almost everything else behind it is electrical, so you are going to get a real consistency in the DSP and the TIAs and the drivers. What sets the yield is the quality of the laser to a large degree, and we command a premium. Why?
Because that premium is more than offset by the quality and the yield that our customers are able to get out of their transceivers. To your question now, what we see in the market, at least right now, interestingly enough, we get this all over the place, which is, hey, these Chinese guys are coming in, they are adding a bunch of supply. What we said on our last earnings call was that we are actually going to increase the number of CW lasers because we see an opportunity. At least at the moment, we see no impact from any Chinese laser supply. In fact, we see a pretty big hole that we are being asked to fill. In the asymptote, I do believe they are going to figure this out. The degree of difficulty on a CW laser is high. It is not as high as EMLs.
It is not as high as a high-powered laser that we ship into the CPO and NPO opportunities. I think it is going to take longer than people think, but eventually, I think you are going to see Chinese laser suppliers come on. I think it is largely relegated to 70 mW and 100 mW CW suppliers, which is a high volume today. You sort of understand what I said on SiPho. That is going to be a very interesting part of the market, but it is something I think they can execute to, Chinese suppliers can execute to. It is not such an interesting part of the market for us.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Particularly because they do have all the raw material suppliers as well to be able to grow, all the actual lasers needed for it. Okay, great. I would love to get your thoughts on NPO, as engagements in the last quarter actually surprised me. Your bare EML chips already ship to every module maker, but your team described a new product form, the EML packaged as a module, built so customers who do not want to handle the bare laser chip can still build NPO systems. My question is, will NPO be a bridge that pulls the in-rack opportunity forward as CPO matures, or is it a lasting third architecture, and how should we size it?
Yeah. Okay, let me describe, and again, a super question because there is just a lot of range to it. The large customer, NVIDIA, really is adopting CPO. What is CPO? CPO simply means that the optical engine is going on the same substrate as their main compute, whether that is a switch or whether that is their GPU. Okay? NPO, what does that mean? NPO means that the optical engine is off the substrate.
It is somewhat decoupled from the main compute substrate, the main switch substrate, if that is where you are trying to put the optical engine. And that opportunity for us is we view as, again, very much additive, but actually larger than the CPO opportunity, at least in the near term. Why? Because what we see from customers is a higher adoption rate of optical lanes, at least to start, than we would see from NVIDIA.
Very high adoption of optical lanes. That is, again, great for us. NPO has a number of different forms. One form that you talked to is putting the laser in the same package as the PIC, as the laser driver, making it a complete optical engine in a single package. For us, again, we see ourselves as largely a component supplier. We want to supply components. We also see ourselves as a great packaging house. If you look at everything that we do, you have lasers that ultimately get into a package, and that packaging capability is an underappreciated part of Lumentum. We can apply that packaging capability to the whole optical engine, integrating the laser in with all of these other components to make a complete optical engine. In the case that you have the laser inside that package, that is super interesting and very complex.
A number of the NPO, and certainly the early CPO architectures are different. They pull the entire laser content outside that optical engine. It is a separate block. We call it an ELS, an external light source. And that actually moves off of this whole substrate issue and out onto the faceplate of the tray. And in that configuration, again, we can compete effectively for the ELS. NVIDIA, look, they have the best optical engineers in the world, right? They can compete with us any day of the week. Still, they decided to adopt in their early architectures, this ELS, and we think we can compete for that ELS. It is not so much a high degree of packaging capability there, right?
It's more an issue of we control a lot of the bill of materials, and we think we can get a decent margin while competing for a bigger piece of the revenue pie. For other customers, for NPO, they've actually, interestingly enough, adopted a very similar architecture where they've decided to pull the lasers out of that optical engine, creating, again, an ELS. There, because the optical capability might be less than in NVIDIA, they're actually requiring us to ship the entire ELS to participate in their opportunity. So great revenue for us because we control these high-powered lasers, which are extremely difficult to make. We are able to participate at great margins and in a pretty meaningful way.
Sounds like you have a great opportunity with NVIDIA on the ELS.
Yeah, and other customers. I think that—
Yeah.
—as the NPO customers, Gianni, think about deploying, several of them are saying, "Look, we want to take this NPO architecture in the same direction that NVIDIA did and deploy this ELS.
Yes. So it helps with the transition, I guess, to CPO. Okay, great. Perhaps we'll shift on the fab side of the business. Let's touch a little bit onto the supply chain. You previously mentioned Greensboro will see first revenue in 2028, and I believe full production in 2029. This is a fab size for billions in annual revenue. You currently have multiple LTAs and capacity [buy sign]. So two things here, really. Firstly, what did you see that gave you the conviction to commit first? Secondly, now that there are customers queuing up to underwrite the capacity, how do you decide how much of the future build stays on your risk versus theirs?
Yeah. Look, this is a complicated problem, and you're not the first one to ask about it. That is, we have to bet so far ahead of when we would see orders. Our build cycle, we talked to the investors about acquiring that Greensboro fab in early calendar 2026, and it's not operational until early calendar 2028. So it's a two-year cycle to get that darn thing into production, and that's pretty fast. I'd say our team that is doing it is probably the best in the planet. The team that we inherited from Qorvo that drives that fab is a really good team, and so I think two years is a pretty aggressive cycle. So we had to invest in two years ahead.
Now, we obviously had these discussions with NVIDIA that have emerged with, one, a very substantial long-term agreement that we've characterized as a multibillion-dollar deal, and then, of course, the investment where they helped us considerably buy that fab and equip it and outfit it. So it's been a great partnership with them. We are looking to get similar types of deals with NPO customers. The NPO customers, as I said, we see, at least in the near term, a larger opportunity with the NPO customers than we do with the CPO customer. We believe the CPO customer, if they wanted, they could take all of that capacity, and then we'd be in the business of looking for additional capacity. At the moment, that hasn't happened. More, I think, timing issues. I think they certainly could, just given the demand signal we're seeing.
And so what we're trying to do is lock up additional business now with these NPO opportunities to fill that fab up and more, right? It may end up being something where we have to go out and get additional capacity down the road. But as I say, this NPO opportunity has surprised us with both the timing and the magnitude vector. In order for me to invest, I would definitely need to see a similar type of commitment as we ultimately got from NVIDIA. They've been a great partner. I think they're a great partner for the entire industry, but certainly for us in terms of allaying some of my fears about expending all this money and deploying it into a fab that has a multiyear cycle before you see it pay off.
If that additional capacity would indeed come, it would be like 2028 story onwards, because that's when you see the inflection in CPO.
Yeah. Look, again, what surprised us with NPO is, again, timing and magnitude vector.
I think prior to our last earnings call, we probably thought that it was going to be a late 2028 into early 2029 event. It seems like the market has caught on to these same physics issues. No surprise. But in order to compete effectively with NVIDIA, they've said, "Look, we need to deploy a lot more optics, and we actually need to do so sooner." It seems like now it's a late 2027 into early 2028 event. And again, the magnitude is such that it's going to put a lot of pressure on that Greensboro fab. So we need to think now about our next leg of the stool. What can we do to add more capacity? We have a lot of differentiation, I think, in this high-powered laser. And as you and I have discussed, a lot of this is the fab.
Your question talked about fab. We're part TSMC, part semiconductor design house. It's really a marriage of the fabrication facility and our design capability that makes all this possible. It's not like NVIDIA, Broadcom, the great semiconductor houses where there's a strict delineation between them and TSMC. These are very much intermingled. Our process control, our fabrication know-how is intermingled with the ability to design and make these lasers at reasonable yields and reasonable margins.
Maybe staying on this fab theme, you are expanding to Indium phosphide fabs in Japan, qualifying CW and EML on the newest tools simultaneously, holding to more than 50% EML unit growth by December quarter. You spent the last three months securing additional substrates because ultra-high power demand outran the supply. My question is, what is the binding constraints over the next 18 months? Substrates at peak capacity, tool lead times, or people?
More than anything else, it is time. I think in the fab business, there are long cycles.
You have long cycles to deploy equipment into the fabs. You have long cycles to qualify products on your own tools, in your own systems, and then you have long cycles to qualify these lasers at the customer. One of the things that we have said, and it is good to remind people, it was a year cycle for us to get qualified at NVIDIA. They are very discriminating in terms of how they test and qualify lasers. There is a lot of fear, some of it founded, most of it unfounded, about the reliability of these lasers, and we have been able to produce really high quality, highly reliable lasers, but there is a huge testing cycle that goes into these things. So that is the long pole in terms of deploying capacity. It is time. There are other issues. You touched on a lot of them. Equipment.
There is a lot of constraint now in terms of getting reactors, getting e-beam litho tools into these fabs. There is constraint in terms of the substrates. The substrate problem has become very significant. Before you got involved in the company, we said, "Look, we feel pretty good. We did a massive deal with a Japanese supplier to secure a lot of substrates." Now, given the demand signal we see, not enough. We went out and did another deal with AXT. Still, that might not be enough. So we are always in search of substrate supply. But really, I would say that the headline is just time. This is a long cycle process, which makes it one that gives us a competitive moat. People do not want to get into this business for a reason.
That makes sense. Okay, maybe let's shift towards the system business. Your system business grew 90% in FY 2026, and your 1.6T modules just left the factory. That's great. With you crediting the signal integrity team because of the degree of difficulty it plays to your strengths. I believe a few years ago, the market saw Lumentum as a components house with less of a module footprint. So what changed inside Cloud Light, and how far does the module ambition go before it collides with the module makers, but also your EML customers?
Yeah, look, the history of Cloud Light is rather a difficult one. When we acquired Cloud Light, they were doing roughly $75 million a quarter, and there were a lot of quality problems coming out of Cloud Light. Our largest customer, Google, was complaining a lot about the quality coming out of the production line. So we took a lot of steps back. Our revenue from Cloud Light dropped below $50 million, a quarterly run rate of 40 to 50, largely because of these quality problems. So we sort of went in, we retooled our engineering. We got back to sort of a $100 million quarterly run rate by virtue of improving the quality, but we were still very late to market. We were coming in behind large competitors like InnoLight, like Coherent, like Eoptolink. We just simply couldn't figure out the time to market.
At the 1.6T transition, suddenly we started to get things right. We put an intense degree of focus on our engineering and our turn time, retooled the entire process, retooled the way we thought about engineering these modules. As you said, at 1.6T, you're getting into a world where signal integrity, for all the reasons we've been talking about with optics, it becomes really hard, right? So our engineers have figured that out. We have a good signal integrity team, and suddenly we got to the head of the curve at 1.6T. We are now shipping ahead of great competitors like InnoLight and Coherent. We're first to market with a lot of our SKUs, and that's given us a great increase in our revenue. We are now running well over $200 million a quarter in that business.
It's doing fantastically well, and we expect it to grow considerably throughout 2027. Challenge for us, as you know, has always been the margin of that business. As we've now fixed the engineering side of the equation, we've yet to fix the gross margin. It's still a challenge for us. We don't perform as well as the top competitors, and we've got to structurally fix that. So we were able to fix the engineering problem. What we're looking at as we enter calendar 2027 is how do we fix the manufacturing? How do we go best in class or not? I don't think we're ever going to get as good as InnoLight or Eo pto, but I think we can get a lot better in terms of the margin.
There's always that debate about merchant versus module suppliers. The margins are slightly better always on the merchant side, if that makes sense. Maybe I'd like to take a question on the long-term technology risk, and this might be an interesting one for you. The eventual threat to the discrete laser is heterogeneous integration, and it comes in two flavors: InP bonded on SiPh, which already exists commercially, and lasers grown directly on silicon, which does not. You'll likely have the first dibs on seeing this, given your position in the market. So where are each of them really? Give us your bird's eye view.
Yeah. This shows your technical acumen, and I'm glad Kathy prepared me for this question. Thank goodness for that, because it is quite a deep one. Look, this is an opportunity for us, actually. I don't see it as a threat. We're already working with the best silicon manufacturers to embed Indium phosphide in their processes. We think if we can do that and work with them, we just have a much greater adoption of Indium phosphide. So we see an opportunity, again, with the best in the world silicon processing houses to embed Indium phosphide as a critical layer in their process. We see an opportunity, as you said, which has been done before, to embed the laser right on a silicon photonics PIC.
We actually think that's an enabler because as really a component supplier first and a module supplier second, we see that change as enabling a component vector, making the modules a bit easier to make by putting the laser and solving some of the inherent alignment difficulties that you get right on top of the photonics IC. So, as I say, if you're a module guy, it might be more challenging because it sort of moves towards more of a commoditization vector. But we see ourselves as components first. We actually think that this is something we want to enable rather than fight against.
But my next question would be basically exactly what you alluded to, which is if it would be fair to say that even in a bonded world, someone still needs to grow and supply the InP gain material, right? The integration doesn't actually threaten that much the laser makers. If anything, it just changes where the laser lives and actually who packages it. So in a way, you still need the laser. Anyways. So, great. I'll sneak one in onto the geopolitics, particularly on China. Now, we know that there are some second-order risks from the supply of raw materials to the Japanese substrate providers.
So perhaps, can you give us a bird's eye view on both the upside and downside risks around China, whether that is in the form of the supply chain or export control restrictions that could potentially cut Chinese module makers' exports, which would make the Western module and merchant makers left with potentially added demand?
Yeah, look, again, a super thoughtful question, and for us, I think it plays in multiple dimensions. We are viewed, probably correctly so, as a net beneficiary of a move by the United States government to ban Chinese transceivers. I would view that as potentially a net positive. I think the challenge is that the Chinese transceiver suppliers make 70% of the transceivers in the U.S. market. It would be a problem to cut that off entirely if things aren't done in a thoughtful way. So I'm thinking now more in the macro, right? In the entire hyperscaler industry, if you suddenly said there was no Chinese supply, that would be a challenge. That would certainly be a significant issue. Again, we think we can mobilize and respond to that challenge relatively quickly.
Coherent, who's a great manufacturer of transceivers, I think has probably mobilized and respond to that, but it will take us some time. In that gulf, what happens? I think however the U.S. government is thinking about that needs to be done in a thoughtful manner and work with the industry at large including the hyperscalers to institute the right set of parameters around it. Then the concern, of course, is there some tit for tat? Right now, we've been able to really work well with the Chinese sub-component suppliers to get us the supply we need, whether that be substrates, whether that be isolators, whether that be other raw material that we need on our manufacturing process.
Is any escalation that occurs that curtails to the first part of your question, the ability for us to get Chinese supply, that would also be a bit of a struggle. Again, we have a nice attribute in that we have a global footprint. We have manufacturing, as you know, in Thailand. We actually have manufacturing in China itself, which can be an advantage when dealing with Chinese supply. We have laser manufacturing in the United Kingdom, which is generally a safe harbor relative to substrates and things of that nature. So we have a lot of things that work to our advantage, but depending on how this all plays out, Johnny, again, we're definitely viewed as a net beneficiary, and I'd see myself in the asymptote.
That probably can work out just fine, but it's definitely something that I think needs a lot more thought than perhaps is being given at the moment.
Absolutely. We have one minute left, so I'll squeeze one last one. It is 2031. Lumentum rode out an incredible super cycle and built out more capacity for an evolving landscape. Paint us the picture. Does optical become the default fabric of computing the way copper was for the last 20 years? What does Lumentum look like? What is the one thing in this room should watch over the next 12- 18 months to say that we're on track towards this?
Yeah, look, there's no doubt. You started with a question, you ended with a question. There's no doubt that optics is going to become a prevalent form of connectivity in the data center. No doubt. I think as we look at 2031, huge adoption of NPO, huge adoption of CPO, huge adoption of OCS, all of which has high optical content. It's going to be a good time for anybody in the optics industry, and we're generally viewed as the leader. I think the thing that is going to be significant is the scale in, and that's the thing to watch over the next 12 - 18 months. Does this thing really take hold? Are you going to see optics not only penetrate, which I think is largely a foregone conclusion, the back plane.
Are you going to see it actually go in tray and serve this high bandwidth connectivity between memory and between GPUs? I think we'll know more in 12 - 18 months around that particular opportunity.
Thank you very much, Michael. Been a pleasure.
Gianni, thank you as always. Appreciate it.