Optical interconnects: the backbone of AI data centres — Lumentum CEO on theCUBE
Key points
Key takeaways from theCUBE's interview with Michael Hurlston, president and chief executive of Lumentum, recorded at the CASPA CEO Summit 2026 in Santa Clara with John Furrier and Dave Vellante (October 2026):
- The electrical-to-optical shift inside the data centre: Hurlston argues the next growth wave is converting intra-data-centre connectivity from copper to fibre optics. The buildout of AI factories has already quadrupled Lumentum's business in just over a year, he says, but the in-factory conversion is the next driver.
- Physics favours light: at 200 gigabit per lane and above, copper's resistance limits how far a signal can travel — around 10 metres at 800G and as little as 1–2 metres at 1.6T — so power-constrained data centre clusters must be networked with fibre, and nothing travels faster than light.
- Laser supply is the bottleneck: Lumentum runs five wafer fabs and is booked out through 2029. Hurlston cites the indium phosphide constraint as increasingly acute as co-packaged and near-packaged optics come to bear, with capacity still around 70% below the visible demand signal.
- A semiconductor–optics collision: Lumentum is simultaneously designer and manufacturer of laser semiconductors — "the TSMC and the NVIDIA at the same time" — and the optics industry is now learning the scaling playbook semiconductors adopted 15–20 years ago.
- NVIDIA as pace car: the Mellanox acquisition gave NVIDIA deep optical capability and made it a teaching customer; NVIDIA saw the physics problem first and pushed co-packaged optics, with rivals now following via near-packaged approaches.
- Software enters optics: optical circuit switches need software control built around them — one hyperscaler is already deploying OCSs to great effect — a new capability for a once purely hardware-centric industry.
