LITE, COHR, GLW Stocks Surge After Nvidia CEO Calls For Using ‘Optics Where You Must'

• MRVL shares rallied 33%, lending a boost to fellow photonic stocks Coherent Corp, Lumentum Holdings, and Corning.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised the company’s hardware partners at the Computex conference.
• Photonic stocks have surged incredibly year to date.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s endorsement of Marvell Technology as a potential trillion-dollar company, along with his bullish comments on optical data transmission technology, boosted shares of key optical component suppliers Coherent Corp, Lumentum Holdings, and Corning on Tuesday.

Coherent stock rose 17.66% to hit an all-time high, while Lumentum shares gained 14% and Corning shares gained 13.4%. Marvell shares rallied 33%, adding $62.4 billion to its market capitalization in a single day.

Optical Components Stocks In Focus

Interest in optical networking companies has surged amid the breakneck expansion of AI data centers, as operators increasingly explore alternative technologies that can deliver faster, more efficient, and lower-power data transmission.

Investors are betting that optical components and photonic networks will become essential for moving massive amounts of data between AI chips, servers, and racks.

Year to date, LITE has surged 173%, while COHR and GLW have gained about 126% each.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for COHR shifted to ‘bullish’ from ‘bearish,’ and sentiment for LITE shifted to ‘neutral’ from ‘bearish,’ while sentiment for GLW remained ‘bearish,’ as of late Tuesday. Message volume surge for COHR and GLW more than tripled over the last 24 hours, while it jumped 9% for LITE.

Huang’s Endorsements 

On Tuesday, Huang said that Marvell could be the “next trillion-dollar company.” He made the remark during an onstage conversation with Marvell CEO Matthew Murphy at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan, shortly after Murphy concluded a presentation showcasing his company’s latest technologies.

In another presentation, Huang touched on the role of optical networks. "We should use copper as much as we can, for as long as we can, but copper has its limits," he said. "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."

To be sure, Huang also highlighted Coherent, Lumentum, and Corning at various points in his presentations. Nvidia has previously invested in all three companies as part of broader strategic and commercial partnerships. 

Together, these companies provide technologies ranging from the chips and lasers that convert electrical signals into light to the fiber networks that carry that light across AI data centers.

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