PITTSBURGH, March 29, 2026, 16:07 EDT
Coherent Corp wrapped up Friday at $243.48, barely moving after a tough session for U.S. stocks. Over in Pittsburgh, a key executive took the stage at a packed industry summit, pitching the optics maker’s multibillion-dollar deal with Nvidia as bigger than just one partnership. Steve Rummel, the company’s senior vice president of engineered materials, told the crowd the agreement “really cements the partnership” and argued it would “support the whole industry.” The Pennsylvania event drew attention from data center, power and manufacturing players. Reuters
Nvidia’s comments carry weight right now, with the company actively backing optics suppliers to meet the surge in demand for faster chip-to-chip data center links. As AI clusters scale up, optical interconnects—which send data using light rather than electricity—are being promoted for boosting bandwidth while pushing power consumption down.
Nvidia is putting $2 billion into Coherent, pairing the investment with several billion dollars’ worth of orders for lasers and optical networking gear, the companies announced March 2. The arrangement, which is nonexclusive and stretches across multiple years, still lets Coherent do business with Google, Meta, and other big data-center names, Rummel said Friday. Jensen Huang pointed to goals like greater “scale, speed and energy efficiency”; Coherent CEO Jim Anderson framed his company as a “key enabler” for the AI data centers of the future. Coherent Inc
The company’s shares picked up another boost from the market environment. Coherent was added to the S&P 500 ahead of the opening bell on March 23, joining Vertiv, Lumentum, and EchoStar. Reuters noted that such index changes tend to spark buying from funds tied to the benchmark.
Coherent hasn’t let up on its pitch for new tech. At the OFC trade show in Los Angeles on March 17, the company rolled out demos of co-packaged optics—moving optical components right up next to chips—alongside 1.6T and 3.2T pluggable transceivers. Those are terabit-per-second links aimed at powering future AI networks. Lumentum, another name in the optics space, stepped into the S&P 500 alongside Coherent this month.
Coherent posted fiscal second-quarter revenue of $1.69 billion, marking a 17% increase from the same period last year.
The upside isn’t a given. Earlier this month, Reuters pointed out that co-packaged optics have yet to hit a price point that works for mass deployment. Then came Friday’s steep selloff, knocking the Dow into correction and making clear just how jittery AI-related stocks get when risk appetite recedes.
Coherent’s appeal goes beyond just AI optics. According to Reuters company data, the firm supplies lasers, transceivers, and engineered materials to both communications and industrial sectors, offering investors wider exposure as the Nvidia partnership shifts from headline to implementation.
