New York, March 3, 2026, 10:03 EST — Regular session
- Nvidia slipped roughly 2% in early trade, trailing a hard drop across tech stocks right at the bell.
- The chipmaker plans to pour $2 billion apiece into optics suppliers Lumentum and Coherent.
- Nvidia’s GTC event later this month is on traders’ radar, with attention locked on any new clues about demand and upcoming products.
Nvidia slipped over 2% early Tuesday, caught in a wider technology slide and overshadowing fresh headlines about its new data-center optics supply-chain initiative. Shares lost $3.96, down 2.2%, trading at $178.52 and putting Nvidia’s market value near $4.5 trillion.
Nvidia’s next leg up isn’t just tied to GPU speed. What’s at stake: moving huge amounts of data fast—and without a bigger power bill—within “AI factories,” those packed data centers handling the heavy lifting of training and running big AI models.
Photonics offers a workaround—using light instead of electrical signals to connect chips and racks. That swap means more bandwidth, less energy waste. Nvidia is already moving to secure components and production slots ahead of the upcoming build cycle.
Not much relief across the broader market. The Nasdaq dropped close to 2% at the open, investors eyeing the escalating Middle East conflict. Oil surged around 7%, stoking worries about fresh inflation pressures.
Nvidia on Monday said it struck a multiyear, nonexclusive deal with Lumentum, locking in a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and securing access to advanced laser components. “AI has reinvented computing and is driving the largest computing infrastructure buildout in history,” CEO Jensen Huang said. NVIDIA Newsroom
Another arrangement with Coherent comes with much the same mix—a multiyear pact, billions in purchases, and guarantees on future access and capacity for Coherent’s advanced laser and optical networking gear. Nvidia is also putting in $2 billion. Coherent’s CEO Jim Anderson described the deal as “a key enabler of next-generation AI data center infrastructure.” NVIDIA Newsroom
Optics stocks took a hit Tuesday. Lumentum dropped roughly 9%, while Coherent lost close to 6% in morning trading, with investors pulling back from growth names.
Private investors aren’t sitting out the photonics push. Ayar Labs, a company backed by Nvidia, just closed a $500 million funding round, landing at a $3.75 billion valuation. The play: “light-based” chip-to-chip connections, designed to ramp up AI speeds and tackle the bottleneck between compute and memory. Reuters
Nvidia landed a more understated headline on Tuesday after diagnostics upstart Droplet Biosciences announced it’s teaming up with Nvidia and tapping Parabricks software to turbocharge genomic analysis in cancer testing. That’s shaved some of the heaviest computational steps from over a day down to just hours, according to chief scientific officer Wendy Winckler at Droplet.
Right now, the whole sector is trading in lockstep. Advanced Micro Devices dropped roughly 4%, while U.S.-listed Taiwan Semiconductor tumbled over 5%. Just like that, a macro jolt can drown out any single-name story.
Still, photonics is a wager on supply and capacity, not an immediate fix for top-line growth. The tech faces a big test: can it scale up smoothly in the biggest clusters, or will it spark fresh reliability headaches or unexpected costs?
Nvidia’s GTC conference lands in San Jose from March 16 to 19, with CEO Huang taking the stage for his keynote on March 16. The company’s also scheduled a Q&A for investors and analysts on March 17.
