Coherent Corp. The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed 2026

Yeah. Thanks, Matt. It's great to talk to you again and really great to be here.

At its core, Matt, it's all about optical communications, right? I've been in the optical communications, optical networking industry for almost 30 years, and I can tell you, this is perhaps the most exciting time in photonics and optical networking. Now coming back to optical communications. People have been communicating with light is not new. The Phoenicians were signaling with light thousands of years ago, right? It's not something new. Jokes apart, modern communications began with the telegraph. That connectivity was all electrical. But when you need to go longer distances or you want to go at higher speeds or a combination of higher speeds and longer distances, the only way to do it is optical. The physics demands that you drive towards optical. So today, most of the world's communications networks are all on an optical backplane, right? That's the backbone of the optical communications networks.

Let me give you an example. You pick up your phone and let's say you're sending a photo or you're talking to your friend in Singapore. The first talk between your phone and the RF tower is RF signals. But at the base of every one of those RF towers these days is an optical transceiver. So that takes electrical signals, converts them to optical signals, and pushes it through the fiber network. From that point on, your data, your voice is in the optical domain. It goes through the access networks, the metro networks, the long-haul networks, and some point of time, because the signal needs to go to Singapore, you enter a submarine cable landing station. There is one 100 miles from where we are right now. Where I am right now, there is a submarine cable that goes all the way to Singapore.

Your signals go through the submarine cable. Then when it comes to Singapore, then you have the same old distribution, and then it comes into the RF tower and back to the phone. All of that is optical. By the way, Coherent, we have one of the broadest and deepest portfolios in the optical industry. We have the photonic components and modules that enable you to do all of that, right? All of those components that you need from this one end of cell tower to the other cell tower, we are able to provide. Now, let me come back to scale across, right? You started by asking scale across. Now, what's scale across? Data centers are power constrained. You know that. That's the single-- Any discussion on the data center, it starts with energy. It's about energy efficiency, et cetera.

When you have large AI workloads, now these workloads are being forced to be spread across multiple data centers because there's just not enough power in one data center to process these large workloads. So that in turn drives a demand for these very high bandwidth connections between the data centers.

That's what we call, the industry has started to refer to that as scale across networks.

Let me just start by saying optical networks have been becoming increasingly disaggregated over the years. Large monolithic systems have been sort of giving way to smaller, easy-to-deploy functional elements or functional blocks. There are two important functional blocks for scale across. One is data center interconnect transceivers, or DCI. Just by the definition, these are transceivers that sit at the edge of a data center. They are high bandwidth, high capacity transceivers that take electrical signals, convert them to optical signals, and then shoot it across to the next data center. But equally important is another class of equipment that is called optical transport equipment, and that equipment sits in between the two data centers. And again, as the name implies, optical transport equipment helps transport the optical signal. And you say, what does that mean?

Well, when you launch an optical signal into a fiber, after the signal goes for a certain distance, it starts to die down. It attenuates. So you need amplifiers to boost the signal again.

You need signal conditioning. You need to monitor the strength of the signal, the health of the signal. You need to monitor the health of the fiber infrastructure. So all of those functions are being done by this transport equipment. So it is a pretty important class of equipment. So two main functional blocks, data center interconnect transceivers and transport equipment. Your question on what is it, what are the performance metrics, right? What is it? Yeah that customers care about?

Again, for the past 30 years, the longest I have been in this market, it always starts with bandwidth. Bandwidth, bandwidth, and then energy efficiency. That has been the mantra for quite some time. Other things like reliability are all a given. They are like table stakes. But in the AI data center context, it is a really big focus on energy. So customers are looking at how we can improve every little bit of energy efficiency within this equipment.