Toronto, May 20, 2026, 10:03 EDT
- POET shares climbed around 11% in early Nasdaq trading, bouncing back after a steep drop Tuesday on dilution worries.
- The company finished a US$400 million registered direct offering, selling about 19 million shares and giving out warrants for 19 million more.
- POET now has more cash to scale up its AI photonics manufacturing. But investors want to see evidence that orders will convert to real volume revenue.
POET Technologies Inc. shares rose early Wednesday on the Nasdaq. The move comes after investors sold the stock on dilution worries linked to its new US$400 million financing, which has now closed. POET was last up around 11% to $14.55, after opening at $14.70. The stock traded as high as $15.21 earlier in the session.
POET is moving to scale up from a photonics supplier to a volume manufacturer targeting AI data centers. Photonic integrated circuits, or PICs, are chips built to move data with light, and chip and network firms are using them as power and bandwidth hit limits in bigger AI systems.
POET said Monday it closed a registered direct offering, raising $400,000,020 in gross proceeds after selling 19,047,620 common shares plus a warrant for the same number of shares. An institutional investor bought the shares and warrants at $21.00 each. The warrant is good for three years at $26.25 per share.
POET CEO Suresh Venkatesan said the company is “expanding our capacity by roughly ten-fold” for wafer output and optical-engine assembly, aiming for bigger manufacturing volumes in 2027. POET said it now has more than 115 people worldwide and 20,000 square feet of assembly space in Malaysia. POET Technologies
POET Technologies is raising a lot of cash as it continues to put up small sales numbers. The company’s first-quarter revenue hit $503,389, rising from $166,760 last year. Net loss came in at $12.3 million, or 8 cents per share. Cash used in operations was negative $8.8 million in the quarter.
Lumilens gave the near-term bull case a boost after announcing a deal last week. The company made an initial $50 million purchase order for POET-made electrical-optical interposer engines. POET said the partnership could reach over $500 million in five years if development, qualification, and scaling in manufacturing all work out.
Lumilens CEO Ankur Singla called GPU interconnects a “defining bottleneck” for scaling AI. POET and Lumilens expect to have engineering samples late 2026 and to align production ramp with hyperscale customer deployments in 2027. Hyperscale data centers are big cloud campuses operated by tech giants. POET Technologies
POET shares slid 8.02% to finish Tuesday at $13.07, with 76.1 million shares traded. Investors reacted to the company’s cash raise and new-share dilution, The Motley Fool reported. Peers moved in different directions during the session, with Lumentum up and Applied Optoelectronics down, according to the same report.
The pace of competition is picking up. Bigger optical and networking names like Lumentum, Coherent and Marvell are also caught up in the AI-infrastructure spending push. Reuters said in March that Nvidia was planning to invest $2 billion each in Lumentum and Coherent to help boost photonics for AI chips.
Marvell’s name is showing up in POET’s swings this week. On April 27, POET said Marvell Semiconductor, which took over Celestial AI, had scrapped all Celestial AI orders and accused POET of confidentiality issues related to order and shipping details. POET said then it was still working on other AI and optical networking projects, including a separate customer order worth about $5 million.
POET’s main challenge looks like execution, not only financing. The company has more cash, but needs to qualify its products, ramp up manufacturing, secure orders and move from engineering to regular shipments. Its filings caution that problems with high-volume production, product performance or demand could impact results. There’s also a warrant overhang—more shares might get issued if the stock climbs high enough.
The stock now trades like a proof-of-concept, with a reset balance sheet. Up ahead, the focus shifts to whether the company can turn press releases and purchase orders into consistent revenue by 2027. The next hurdle looks less dramatic.
