Nvidia burns $4B to light up American photonics manufacturing

Nvidia is dipping into its war chest once again this week, investing $2 billion each in Coherent and Lumentum to lock in supply of the vendors' respective silicon photonics technologies.

The $4 billion investment was announced alongside a pair of nonexclusive multibillion-dollar purchase commitments by the GPU slinger to acquire advanced laser components and optical networking products from the two companies.

Both Coherent and Lumentum specialize in optical components, like pluggable transceivers, laser sources, optical circuit switches, and other components used in datacenter optics.

In the wake of the AI boom, Nvidia, which acquired Mellanox in 2020, has emerged as one of the largest networking vendors in the world. Nvidia’s networking business generated more than $31 billion in revenue in its 2026 fiscal year.

While Nvidia has resisted photonics for scale-up NVSwitch fabrics used by its rack-scale compute platforms like the GB200 NVL72, this is largely down to power ...