Photonic fabric / Trump Beijing
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Apple (Tim Cook)
Blackrock (Larry Fink)
Blackstone (Stephen Schwarzman)
Boeing (Kelly Ortberg)
Cargill (Brian Sikes)
Citi (Jane Fraser)
Cisco (Chuck Robbins)
Coherent (Jim Anderson)
GE Aerospace (H Lawrence Culp)
Goldman Sachs (David Solomon)
Illumina (Jacob Thaysen)
Mastercard (Michael Miebach)
Meta (Dina Powell McCormick)
Micron (Sanjay Mehrotra)
Qualcomm (Cristiano Amon)
Tesla/SpaceX (Elon Musk)
Visa (Ryan McInerney)
All the CEOs attending China 🇨🇳 May14th -15th
The most important thing to watch this week.
Now Yes Jensen is not on this trip as originally planned however I’m going to highlight (Coherent) Jim ..
Nvidia invested $2 billion in Coherent and made a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment for advanced laser and optical networking products announced March 2, 2026.
The deal funds Coherent’s U.S.-based manufacturing expansion and deepens R&D collaboration on next-generation AI infrastructure. (Photonic Fabric)
Keeping a close eye on this. Most important meeting this year. & photonic fabric is sitting at a table with XI .
The fact POET is hiring people means we are in the early stage of a mass production They’re hiring ahead of scale. Kumar is there to build the operational infrastructure before volume orders hit supply chain relationships, manufacturing partnerships, quality systems.
This is a credibility hire. POET needs to look like a real company to attract institutional capital, strategic partners, and keep the retail momentum crowd engaged. A COO with a legitimate résumé costs money they don’t really have and does work that isn’t strictly necessary at 80 people. It’s optics-driven.
For a company with $341K in quarterly revenue and a $1.9B market cap, every hire is a signal worth scrutinizing.
The preparatory talks in Seoul are placing semiconductor export controls at the center of the negotiation track. Photonics isn’t on the restricted list the same way advanced logic chips are it’s the adjacent technology that enables AI networking at scale. If chip export restrictions loosen, demand for optical interconnects in Chinese hyperscale data centers explodes.
POET still has operations in Shenzhen. Their old joint venture Super Photonics Xiamen gave them deep China manufacturing relationships. A thaw in the tech trade environment particularly around AI networking hardware is a direct tailwind for POET’s customer pipeline. Chinese hyperscalers (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance) are all building massive AI infrastructure and desperately need 800G/1.6T optical engines that POET produces.
The COO hire + Malaysia production ramp + Beijing summit this week is not a coincidence in timing. POET is positioning to capture both the Western hyperscaler demand AND a potential China market reopening simultaneously. That’s why the stock is at $14 with nobody able to explain why.
Thanks for reading I’m only here to help. There’s a lot of stuff going on if you know where to look. 👀