Lumentum CEO warns of impending bottleneck on critical material used for silicon photonics — fab and material shortfall already lags 30% below customer needs as co-packaged optics demand skyrockets
- ID
- 9612
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 31 Jul 2026, 8:45 PM
- Fetched
- 31 Jul 2026, 9:51 PM
- Provider
- Tom's Hardware
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/lumentum-ceo-says-the-indium-phosphide-shortage-will-become-worse-than-memory
- Source URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 31 Jul 2026, 9:52 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Lumentum CEO Michael Hurlston warned at the RAISE Summit in Paris that indium phosphide—the compound semiconductor used in every AI data center laser—is entering a supply squeeze worse than the DRAM/NAND shortages. Lumentum runs five indium phosphide fabs but is already shipping 30% below customer demand, as hyperscalers order lasers in the hundreds of millions versus telecom's historical hundreds. Nvidia responded in March by investing $2 billion each into Lumentum and Coherent, which together hold most global indium phosphide capacity.
Why it matters
If you build or procure AI infrastructure, expect silicon photonics and co-packaged optics components to face multi-quarter allocation constraints and price pressure—plan procurement timelines and vendor relationships now rather than assuming optics will scale freely with GPU demand.
Discussion angle
What does a 30% optics shortfall mean for Malaysian data center and cloud builders—should teams designing AI workloads around regional capacity assume network bottlenecks before GPU bottlenecks?