$LITE $AAOI $SIVE $CRDO The more I look at the next phase of data center expansion, the more convinced I am that optical connectivity will become one of the most important parts of the entire infrastructure buildout. GPU performance keeps increasing, clusters keep getting larger and bandwidth requirements are rising at an extraordinary rate. At some point, adding more compute is not enough. The data still has to travel between GPUs, racks and data centers quickly enough, while power consumption and latency remain under control. That is exactly where these four companies become interesting. $LITE sits at one of the most critical points of the optical supply chain. Its expertise in InP lasers and high power laser technology gives the company exposure to several architectures that could become increasingly important as the industry progresses from traditional pluggable optics toward external laser sources, NPO and eventually CPO. At the same time, demand for 800G and 1.6T continues to increase, creating a very strong environment for optical component suppliers with meaningful manufacturing capacity. $AAOI is becoming increasingly interesting because the company is no longer just positioned around a future opportunity. It is already seeing significant demand for 800G and 1.6T products and is expanding manufacturing capacity to support hyperscaler deployments. If the transition toward 1.6T accelerates as expected, $AAOI has the potential to become a much more important supplier within the data center optical ecosystem. $SIVE is obviously the smallest company of the group, but that is also what makes the setup interesting. Sivers is building its position around InP DFB lasers, one of the components required to generate the optical light used inside these high speed systems. The $JBL 1.6T LRO program is particularly important because successful qualification and production orders would take $SIVE from development exposure toward real volume production. On top of that, the company is expanding its own InP capacity while also maintaining access to external foundries, giving it more flexibility if demand develops faster than expected. Then there is $CRDO, which has gradually become much more than an AEC story. The company is building a broader connectivity platform around SerDes, DSP technology, optical solutions and silicon photonics. That gives Credo exposure to several different ways hyperscalers can solve the same fundamental problem, which is moving enormous amounts of data through increasingly dense compute infrastructure. What makes this group so interesting is that they are not competing for exactly the same piece of the market. $LITE provides critical optical and laser technology. $AAOI is scaling high speed optical transceivers. $SIVE provides the InP laser technology that can sit deeper inside the optical supply chain. $CRDO is building the silicon and connectivity layer around the entire system. Different positions in the stack, but all benefiting from the same structural pressure. Compute is scaling extremely fast. Networking now has to catch up. And as clusters become larger, faster and more power hungry, the value of the technology connecting those clusters could become just as important as the processors themselves.