Coherent ($COHR) hit record $7.12B FY2026 revenue with datacenter at 79% of Q4 and +59% YoY. The NVIDIA $2B stake, the 83-relationship supply chain, EUV lasers, and the co-packaged optics risk.
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Coherent ($COHR) sells the lasers and optical transceivers that move data between AI accelerators, and in fiscal 2026 that business stopped being one line item among many and became the company. Revenue hit a record $7.12B, up 23%, with the Datacenter & Communications segment producing 79% of fourth-quarter revenue and growing 59% year over year. In March 2026 NVIDIA bought $2B of the stock outright and signed a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment on top. The interesting question is no longer whether the AI optics demand is real. It is what Coherent is worth once co-packaged optics changes the product it sells.
👉 See it in context: $COHR anchors the Photonics / CPO basket on Macroplane, alongside the Silicon Photonics & Optical Interconnects trend.
Three businesses under one roof, and the mix has shifted hard.
Networking is the optical transceiver business: 800G and 1.6T modules, the lasers inside them, and the components that go into other people's modules. This is the AI story.
Materials covers engineered materials, silicon carbide substrates, thermoelectrics, and the VCSEL and edge-emitting laser dies that feed both its own modules and its competitors'.
Lasers is the industrial and scientific business: excimer, solid-state and CO2 lasers for semiconductor capital equipment, display manufacturing and precision machining.
The name is recent. II-VI Incorporated bought Coherent in 2022 and took the target's name, then spent three years digesting it. That history matters for reading the financials, because the merger years look nothing like the years since.
Coherent's fiscal year ends in June. The five-year arc:
| Fiscal year | Revenue | Net income | R&D |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2022 | $3.32B | $234.8M | $377.1M |
| FY2023 | $5.16B | −$259.5M | $499.6M |
| FY2024 | $4.71B | −$156.2M | $478.8M |
| FY2025 | $5.81B | $49.4M | $581.9M |
| FY2026 | $7.12B | $805.0M | $723.0M |
Two years ago this was a shrinking, loss-making company working through an acquisition. FY2026 revenue is up 51% on FY2024 and net income swung by nearly a billion dollars. Non-GAAP EPS rose 59% to $5.61, more than twice the rate of revenue growth, which is the signature of operating leverage rather than just volume.
The Q4 FY2026 results give the composition: $2.05B of quarterly revenue, GAAP gross margin 38.5%, and Datacenter & Communications at 79% of the total, up 59% year over year on 800G and 1.6T demand. The industrial laser business did not do that. AI interconnect did.
On 2 March 2026 NVIDIA invested $2B in Coherent through a private placement of common stock, and the same day put $2B into Lumentum ($LITE) on the same terms. $4B into optics in one announcement.
The equity is the headline. The purchase commitment is the substance: a multi-year strategic agreement carrying a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment plus future access and capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products.
Read that as NVIDIA doing what a buyer does when it thinks a component is about to become the constraint. It is not buying a supplier's growth, it is buying priority on that supplier's output — and paying for the US manufacturing capacity to expand it. When the customer with the most visibility into AI cluster roadmaps pre-pays for laser capacity through 2030, that is a stronger demand signal than any analyst estimate.
It also creates concentration. NVIDIA is now simultaneously Coherent's largest customer, a shareholder, and — through its own Spectrum-X and Quantum-X co-packaged switches — a company building products that reduce how many pluggable transceivers the industry needs.
This is where Coherent looks different from a pure transceiver vendor. Macroplane tracks 83 supply-chain relationships for $COHR, and the customer side spans four largely uncorrelated end markets:
| Customer | What Coherent supplies |
|---|---|
| NVIDIA ($NVDA) | 800G/1.6T transceivers for InfiniBand and Ethernet AI fabrics |
| Apple ($AAPL) | VCSEL arrays for FaceID and LiDAR |
| Microsoft ($MSFT) | Optical transceivers for Azure interconnects |
| Meta ($META) | 800G transceivers for AI back-end fabrics |
| ASML ($ASML) | High-power CO2 laser subsystems driving EUV lithography |
| Arista ($ANET), Cisco ($CSCO), Nokia ($NOK), Ciena ($CIEN) | Transceivers and tunable lasers for switches and transport |
| Samsung ($005930.KS) | Excimer laser annealing systems for LTPS-OLED backplanes |
| onsemi ($ON), STMicro ($STM), Infineon ($IFNNY) | 150mm/200mm SiC substrates |
The ASML line is the one people miss. The CO2 laser that vaporises tin droplets to generate EUV light is a Coherent subsystem. Every leading-edge chip in the world is patterned using light that starts in a Coherent laser — a business with nothing to do with AI networking that would survive a transceiver downturn intact.
(Relationship values in Macroplane's graph are estimates from filings and disclosures, not audited contract values. Treat the ranking as directional.)
Upstream, Coherent is unusually vertically integrated but not self-sufficient: AXT ($AXTI) and IQE ($IQEPY) supply InP and GaAs substrates and epiwafers, Marvell ($MRVL) supplies the DSPs inside the transceivers, Fabrinet ($FN) and Jabil ($JBL) provide outsourced assembly, and TSMC ($TSM) fabs its controller ICs. You can walk the whole graph on the Coherent company page.
Every bull case on Coherent has to answer this: co-packaged optics moves the optical engine onto the switch package and deletes the pluggable module. Coherent sells pluggable modules. Is this a melting ice cube?
Three reasons the answer is more nuanced than the framing suggests.
Coherent sells components, not just modules. The lasers, VCSELs, InP chips and optical materials go into co-packaged designs too. Its own graph shows it supplying competitors — Zhongji Innolight, Accelink, Eoptolink and Applied Optoelectronics all buy Coherent components. The company monetises the transition regardless of who assembles the final product.
The laser gets harder, not easier. Putting the optical engine next to a kilowatt-class ASIC means the light source runs hot, which is exactly the constraint we covered in the co-packaged optics explainer. High-power lasers at elevated temperature are a narrower supplier set than pluggable modules, not a wider one. NVIDIA's $2B and its capacity rights on "advanced laser products" are a bet on that specific scarcity.
Pluggables are not stopping. CPO reaches high-end switch ports first. The installed base and the long tail keep scaling to 3.2T for years.
The honest bear case is not that CPO kills Coherent. It is that CPO compresses the value per port that module assemblers capture, and Coherent's Networking segment is now 79% of the business, so the mix leaves less to fall back on than it did in FY2023.
| $COHR | $LITE | $FN | $AAOI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Role | Vertically integrated: materials → lasers → modules | Lasers and transceivers | Contract optical assembly | Transceivers |
| NVIDIA equity stake | $2B | $2B | No | No |
| Non-AI revenue base | Industrial lasers, SiC, EUV optics | Smaller | Diversified by customer | Minimal |
| Exposure if CPO accelerates | Hedged via components | Hedged via lasers | Follows the OEMs | Most exposed |
Coherent is the least pure way to own AI optics, and that is the argument for it. The EUV, VCSEL and SiC businesses mean a transceiver air-pocket does not take the whole company with it. If you want maximum torque to the transceiver cycle, $AAOI gives you more of it — and more of the downside.
COHR is the NYSE ticker for Coherent Corp., an optics and photonics manufacturer headquartered in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. The company was formerly II-VI Incorporated, which acquired Coherent Inc. in 2022 and adopted the Coherent name in September 2022.
It has direct AI exposure: Datacenter & Communications was 79% of fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue and grew 59% year over year on 800G and 1.6T transceiver demand, and NVIDIA holds a $2B equity stake plus a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment. The risks are customer concentration and the co-packaged optics transition compressing module economics. This is research, not financial advice.
Coherent reported record revenue of $7.12B in fiscal 2026 (year ended June 2026), up 23%, with net income of $805.0M against a $156.2M loss two years earlier. Non-GAAP EPS rose 59% to $5.61.
NVIDIA invested $2B in March 2026 via a private placement, alongside $2B in Lumentum, and signed multi-year agreements carrying multi-billion-dollar purchase commitments and future capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products. The purpose is to secure priority access to laser and optics capacity and to fund US manufacturing expansion, as optical interconnect becomes a bottleneck for AI cluster scaling.
It changes what Coherent sells more than whether it sells. CPO removes the pluggable module but still needs lasers, VCSELs, InP chips and optical materials — all of which Coherent supplies, including to competing module makers. The risk is margin compression on the assembly side, which now represents a larger share of the business than it did before the AI ramp.
NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, ASML, Arista, Cisco, Nokia and Samsung, spanning AI transceivers, consumer VCSELs, EUV lithography lasers, and display manufacturing equipment. The full supplier and customer graph is on the Coherent company page.
This is research and education, not financial advice. Do your own work.
COHR is the NYSE ticker for Coherent Corp., an optics and photonics manufacturer headquartered in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. The company was formerly II-VI Incorporated, which acquired Coherent Inc. in 2022 and adopted the Coherent name in September 2022.
It has direct AI exposure: Datacenter & Communications was 79% of fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue and grew 59% year over year on 800G and 1.6T transceiver demand, and NVIDIA holds a $2B equity stake plus a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment. The risks are customer concentration and the co-packaged optics transition compressing module economics. This is research, not financial advice.
Coherent reported record revenue of $7.12B in fiscal 2026 (year ended June 2026), up 23%, with net income of $805.0M against a $156.2M loss two years earlier. Non-GAAP EPS rose 59% to $5.61.
NVIDIA invested $2B in March 2026 via a private placement, alongside $2B in Lumentum, and signed multi-year agreements carrying multi-billion-dollar purchase commitments and future capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products. The purpose is to secure priority access to laser and optics capacity and to fund US manufacturing expansion, as optical interconnect becomes a bottleneck for AI cluster scaling.
It changes what Coherent sells more than whether it sells. CPO removes the pluggable module but still needs lasers, VCSELs, InP chips and optical materials — all of which Coherent supplies, including to competing module makers. The risk is margin compression on the assembly side, which now represents a larger share of the business than it did before the AI ramp.
NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, ASML, Arista, Cisco, Nokia and Samsung, spanning AI transceivers, consumer VCSELs, EUV lithography lasers, and display manufacturing equipment. The full supplier and customer graph is on the Coherent company page. This is research and education, not financial advice. Do your own work.