Noonum Snacks: AI Networking and Optics
What’s happening
At Computex 2026 in Taipei, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang shared the stage with Marvell CEO Matt Murphy and called Marvell Technology the next trillion-dollar company.
Huang argued that as AI training and inference scale to massive, disaggregated data centers, the bottleneck shifts from raw compute to how efficiently chips communicate. He said Marvell’s networking and connectivity chips are “so essential” because they let thousands of accelerators, memory units, and compute nodes work as a single, distributed supercomputer.
Seizing the Opportunity
Noonum’s Agent took a simple investment objective about inter-chip communication and widened it to the broadest version of the theme, which pulls in optical connections too. Here is the strategy it produced:
Invest in companies that supply the networking and optical connections that link AI chips inside and between data centers, including high-speed Ethernet and InfiniBand switches, network interface cards and data processing units, optical transceivers, co-packaged optics, lasers and photonic components, and high-speed copper and fiber cables. The focus is on firms whose growth is driven by the bandwidth needs of large AI clusters.
Noonum’s Strategy Builder returned 231 companies for this strategy, with a combined market cap of $12.6 trillion. NVIDIA and Broadcom top the list, followed by Coherent Corp, Marvell Technology, and Lumentum Holdings.
| Company | Exchange | Conviction | Ling. β | MktBuzz |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Corp | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 91.63% | 17.11% | 54.78% |
| Broadcom Inc | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 84.64% | 19.43% | 10.52% |
| Coherent Corp | 🇺🇸 NYSE | 74.94% | 24.99% | 1.76% |
| Marvell Technology Inc | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 73.71% | 12.75% | 3.30% |
| Lumentum Holdings Inc | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 73.25% | 20.76% | 1.64% |
| Corning, Inc. | 🇺🇸 NYSE | 65.09% | 10.66% | 1.49% |
| Zhongji Innolight Co Ltd | 🇨🇳 SZSE | 63.87% | 11.99% | 0.86% |
| Applied Optoelectronics Inc | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 63.51% | 20.62% | 0.50% |
| Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable Joint Stock Limited Company | 🇭🇰 HKEX | 60.85% | 17.05% | 0.42% |
| Intel Corp. | 🇺🇸 NASDAQ | 60.58% | 6.33% | 6.39% |
The basket’s weight is spread over seven sub-themes, and every one of them is hardware that moves data between chips, servers, racks, and data centers. That makes it more specific than a list of “AI stocks” or a broad semiconductor basket.
| Sub-theme | Weight | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Photonic chips, lasers, and silicon photonics | 24.3% | IQE |
| AI switching and cluster networking | 22.02% | Broadcom |
| Fiber, copper, and active cables | 19.84% | Corning |
| Optical transceivers and modules | 17.71% | Coherent |
| Connectors, fiber arrays, and passive optics | 8.46% | Browave |
| Co-packaged optics and optical engines | 6.6% | Intel |
| NICs, SmartNICs, DPUs, and adapters | 1.08% | Silicom |
Key Insights
Optical chips and modules carry the most weight. Photonic chips and lasers, transceivers, and co-packaged optics add up to 48.61% of the basket, more than twice the weight in switching. The cable and connector sub-themes together come to 28.30%, so they outweigh switching too. They’re what turns chip performance into bandwidth a cluster can actually use. Read why each company made the list and the same things keep coming up: 800G and 1.6T transceivers, indium phosphide devices, CW and EML lasers, modulators, and photodiodes. If Huang is right about where the bottleneck has moved, a lot of it is optical.
Some names look odd until you see why they’re here. Intel, at No. 10, is in for co-packaged optics and optical engines. So is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which makes optical interconnect components through its COUPE photonics platform. Quanta Computer and Wistron usually get filed under server makers, but they qualify because they build switches, NICs, optical modules, or other high-speed interconnect hardware. Further upstream are materials makers like Sumitomo Chemical and IQE, which produce the wafers or specialty optical materials that lasers and photonic chips need. That matters because AI interconnect performance depends more and more on who can make the optical building blocks at scale. A screen that only looks at sector labels could easily pass these companies over.
Just over half the basket is listed in Taiwan and China. Eight of the top 10 trade in the U.S., but by listing venue Taiwan leads the full basket at 25.5%, with China close behind at 25.1%. The United States is third at 18.2%, ahead of South Korea (7.4%) and Japan (6.9%). U.S. names lead on platforms and systems, while much of the optical, connector, and manufacturing work sits in Asia.
The closest fits get almost no attention. Linguistic Beta measures how closely a company’s own language matches the strategy. Market Buzz is its share of the conversation about the theme, compared with its peers. NVIDIA scores 17.11% on the first and 54.78% on the second, the highest Market Buzz in the basket, because the market talks about it as the AI winner across chips, systems, software, and networking. Coherent (24.99%) and Lumentum (20.76%) both beat NVIDIA on Linguistic Beta, and neither gets even 2% of the buzz. Outside the top 10 the gap is wider still. Crealights Technology, a $1 billion Hong Kong-listed company focused on 400G, 800G, and 1.6T transceivers and co-packaged optics, has the basket’s top Linguistic Beta at 57.00%. Its Market Buzz is 0.02%. In this supply chain, a lot of the most important suppliers are not the loudest names.
The Takeaway: The AI chip leaders are only part of this theme. Most of the basket’s weight sits in optics, cables, and connectors, much of it with suppliers in Asia that the market rarely discusses.
Dive deeper into this strategy on Noonum.
This report is published by Noonum for informational and research purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or an offer of any kind. Strategy data as of October 15, 2026. Copyright 2026 Noonum. All rights reserved. noonum.ai