Citi reiterates $658 price target on Ciena after record quarter

Tower Semiconductor and NewPhotonics announced high-volume shipments of laser-integrated, serviceable optical engine photonic integrated circuits developed for next-generation AI infrastructure interconnect. The products are built on Tower's PH18DA silicon photonics platform, which uses heterogeneously integrated indium phosphide components to place semiconductor optical amplifiers, modulators, lasers, and photodetectors on a single chip, and the companies say the integration reduces complexity and manufacturing variability while improving yield, reliability and time to market. Volume production today covers data rates from 800G to 1.6T, with 6.4T solutions planned for future volume manufacturing to serve both scale-out and scale-up architectures, and shipment of the 6.4T NPC505 chipsets is anticipated during the first half of 2027. NewPhotonics is the first player across the market to scale up production on Tower's PH18DA InP-on-silicon photonics platform, and Tower faces execution risks in scaling alongside it, along with competition from alternative architectures and other silicon photonics foundries. Tower's stock has rallied 99.97% in 2026, lifting its market capitalization to $25.85 billion, with an operating margin of 19.63%, a net margin of 16.94%, a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 91.11x, a forward P/E of 38.46x and a return on equity of 9.98%.

Openreach is deploying Ciena's Waveserver platform, powered by WaveLogic 6 1.6Tb/s coherent technology, as part of its Optical Spectrum Extended Access portfolio. The deployment combines 400G and 800G client traffic over dedicated 1.6Tb/s wavelengths, with a compact 2RU chassis supporting up to 32 400G services, and enables Openreach to introduce national 800G services across the U.K. while providing a pathway to higher speeds. The solution will let Openreach offer wholesale customers tailored, high-capacity network services including connectivity for cable landing stations, data centers and core network nodes. Ciena faces competition from Corning, which announced a long-term partnership with NVIDIA to expand U.S.-based optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by 10 times and increase domestic fiber production capacity by more than 50%, and from Nokia, whose Network Infrastructure unit delivered double-digit growth in second-quarter 2026. Ciena shares have gained 27.3% in the past month, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its fiscal 2026 earnings has been revised upward over the past 60 days.

Guangzhi Technology stated on an investor interaction platform on October 9 that its downstream customers for indium phosphide substrate business are domestic and overseas optical communication chip and device manufacturers, and batch deliveries have been achieved to date. The company said its domestic customers cover leading optical chip enterprises, and it has shipped in volume to leading optical communication firms overseas. Among these, the 6-inch indium phosphide substrate has secured an order from a certain global leading customer.

Tianfu Communication released an investor relations activity record announcement, responding to recent rumors about overseas import and export policy restrictions. The company stated that the policies issued so far do not impose constraints on optical device products and do not affect its business. The company said its main business is the research, development, production, and sales of various passive and active optical devices. Its sales revenue from the U.S. market accounts for a relatively low proportion, with North American sales revenue making up about 1.28% of total operating revenue in 2025. Based on current operations, the company's orders on hand and customer demand remain robust overall, and it will advance global capacity expansion in an orderly manner according to market demand and customer project timelines. The company remains optimistic about the long-term prospects of the optical interconnect industry, especially the continued growth opportunities in areas such as CPO and NPO. In addition, the company's FAU and ELS products supporting CPO already have a solid foundation in performance, yield, and delivery assurance, and these products have achieved stable mass production and delivery.

Arista Networks has unveiled a new open Ethernet rack-scale portfolio designed to support high-density artificial intelligence infrastructure across both scale-up and scale-out environments, developed with AMD, Arm, Broadcom, d-Matrix, Meta, Microsoft and Qualcomm. The company's Etherlink SU-14 architecture extends Ethernet into scale-up environments, supporting up to 144 accelerators in a single rack and up to 1,024 XPUs through cross-rack configurations. For scale-out AI environments, the rack-scale solutions support technologies such as ESUN, NVIDIA's NVLink, NVLink Fusion and PCIe, built on Arista's Netdi foundation using Ultra Ethernet Consortium standards. The rack designs integrate liquid-cooled 7060EX7 switches with up to 102.4 Tbps of capacity per switch, and the company's next-generation optics, including XPO and open CPO/NPO, can raise networking capacity from 1.6 Pb/s to 6.5 Pb/s per rack compared with current OSFP-based switches. Arista faces competition from Cisco Systems, which is expanding its AI infrastructure business through its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, and from NVIDIA, which is advancing its Vera Rubin platform and developing Spectrum-6 Ethernet.

Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. has joined the Open Co-packaged Interface Multi-Source Agreement, or Open CPX MSA, a consortium working to advance interoperable near-package and co-packaged optics architectures for AI networking. As a member, Credo will contribute its optical DSPs, silicon photonics-based integrated circuits and other components to support the standard, which released its initial specification on September 17, 2026, defining interoperable co-packaged and near-package optical modules supporting connectivity of up to 7.2 Tbps per socket. The company also recently completed testing of its Toucan Gen6x16 PCI Express retimer, which has been added to the PCI-SIG Integrators List. Credo shares have returned 51.95% year to date, and as of October 7 the stock traded at a trailing price-to-earnings multiple of approximately 77.70x and a forward P/E of 30.19x. By the end of Q2 2026, 86 hedge funds held positions in the stock, up from 59 in Q1 2026, with BlackRock the largest institutional owner at 17.76 million shares, or 9.45% of outstanding shares.