---
title: "Ciena's performance \"standing in the light\" strengthens the main line of AI optical interconnection! Q2 profit surged 290%, and performance outlook crushes expectations"
type: "News"
locale: "en"
url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/288723716.md"
description: "Ciena announced its Q2 performance, with profits soaring by 290%, far exceeding market expectations. Its AI optical interconnect business benefits from the global AI data center construction boom, with revenue and gross margin accelerating simultaneously. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang endorsed Maywell Technology, emphasizing that connectivity capabilities are the bottleneck for AI computing power expansion, highlighting the core position of the optical communication industry chain"
datetime: "2026-06-04T12:45:02.000Z"
locales:
  - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/288723716.md)
  - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/288723716.md)
  - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/288723716.md)
---

# Ciena's performance "standing in the light" strengthens the main line of AI optical interconnection! Q2 profit surged 290%, and performance outlook crushes expectations

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Ciena (CIEN.US), which focuses on high-speed interconnection DCI between different data centers and the demand for high-speed optical interconnection within AI data centers, announced a strong quarterly performance and fiscal year revenue outlook that far exceeded market expectations. **This highlights that the high-speed optical interconnection demand driven by major U.S. cloud service providers in the global AI data center construction frenzy has transformed from a "long-term growth narrative" into a synchronized acceleration trajectory of revenue, gross margin, and adjusted EPS in the AI optical interconnection/optical communication infrastructure supply chain.**

Just before Ciena announced its strong performance, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, known as the "Godfather of AI," stated during a panel discussion with the CEO of Marvell at the Computex conference in Taipei on the second day of 2026, **that Marvell has the potential to become the next publicly traded company with a market value exceeding $1 trillion, and emphasized its crucial role in the optical interconnection infrastructure systems of large AI data centers. This clear endorsement from the strongest leader in the AI computing power field significantly enhances market confidence in Marvell's long-term growth path.**

Matt Murphy, CEO of Marvell Technology, delivered a keynote speech titled "The Future of AI Scaling Depends on Connectivity" at the 2026 Computex conference, where he clearly emphasized that as the demand for computing power resources related to large AI models and the exponential growth of large-scale AI computing power infrastructure clusters increase, the improvement in computing performance has gradually outpaced the capabilities of data movement and high-speed DCI interconnection between and within data centers. **Therefore, the next phase of AI computing power expansion bottlenecks will be dominated by "connectivity capabilities rather than single-node computing power," and leaders in the AI optical interconnection/optical communication infrastructure supply chain, such as Ciena, which "stands in the light" alongside Marvell, are undoubtedly positioned at the core of this new infrastructure lifeline with AI data center optical interconnection, ultra-high-speed DSP, 1.6Tb/s coherent optical transmission, and silicon photonics technology chain.**

## Ciena Revenue Surges Over 40% with Upgraded Quarterly and Full-Year Performance Guidance

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 ending on May 2, 2026, **Ciena's total revenue reached $1.5707 billion, representing a significant year-on-year growth of 39.5%, clearly higher than $1.1259 billion in the same period of 2025; adjusted EPS soared to $1.64, a substantial increase of 290% compared to $0.42 in the same period last year.** **Both core data points significantly exceeded market expectations, with FactSet consensus showing EPS of $1.46 and revenue of approximately $1.51 billion, meaning Ciena's actual performance exceeded expectations by $0.18 per share and about $60 million;** Seeking Alpha's figures indicate revenue exceeded expectations by about $70 million, with both directions consistent, highlighting that revenue and profit are significantly stronger than the growth expectations that Wall Street analysts have been continuously raising recently The quality of earnings has also significantly improved. Ciena's second-quarter GAAP gross margin rose from 40.2% in the same period last year to 44.0%, while the adjusted gross margin increased from 41.0% to 44.9%; GAAP operating profit margin surged from 2.9% to 15.1%, and the adjusted operating profit margin rose from 8.2% to 19.5%; GAAP diluted EPS increased significantly from $0.06 to $1.49. **The adjusted EBITDA soared from $116.7 million to $341.8 million. This indicates that the company is not solely relying on the "explosion of data center orders" to drive revenue but has entered a strong phase of operating leverage release: optical interconnect + data center DCI + network hardware, along with platform software, product after-sales service combinations, and customer concentration have collectively boosted profit elasticity.**

From a business structure perspective, Ciena's growth is highly indicative of the high-speed interconnect cycle for AI data centers. In the second quarter, Networking Platforms business revenue reached $1.274 billion, accounting for 81.1% of total revenue; among them, **the Optical Networking business revenue closely related to data center optical interconnect was $1.0998 billion, accounting for 70.0% of total revenue, significantly higher than $773.6 million in the same period last year;** Routing and Switching revenue was $174.2 million, also higher than $92.7 million in the same period last year. Two customers contributing over 10% combined accounted for 34.0% of revenue data, indicating that hyperscale cloud customers and large customer AI data center projects remain the core driving force of this growth, but it also means that customer concentration is a variable that must be monitored in valuations.

Regarding the performance outlook that investors are focusing on, **the company continues to revise its outlook upward, further validating that the demand for AI optical interconnect is not a one-time expansion.** Ciena expects third-quarter fiscal year revenue to be in the range of $1.625 billion, with a fluctuation of $50 million, higher than Wall Street's consensus expectation of $1.5 billion, with an adjusted gross margin of approximately 45% ± 50 basis points, and an adjusted operating profit margin of 19%—20%; **at the same time, it has raised the full-year revenue guidance for fiscal year 2026 to $6.3 billion ± $1 billion, with the midpoint indicating a significant year-on-year growth of about 32%, far exceeding analysts' expectations of about $6.08 billion, and expects a full-year adjusted gross margin of 44.5%—45%, and an adjusted operating profit margin of approximately 19% ± 50 basis points. This is a further upward adjustment from the previously provided full-year revenue range of $5.9 billion—$6.3 billion in March this year, reflecting management's increased confidence in the visibility of data center orders, delivery pace, and supply-demand environment.**

![1780576261(1).png](https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://img.zhitongcaijing.com/image/20260604/1780576275844929.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg)

Ciena's earnings report shows that the company's management stated that the expansion of AI data centers is pushing high-speed connectivity capabilities to the infrastructure bottleneck position, **especially emphasizing that cloud computing vendors are building data centers on a large scale around AI, driving the continuous rise in demand for high-speed optical connections "within and between data centers."** \*\*

**From a medium to long-term perspective, as the expansion of AI computing power infrastructure moves towards clustering, distribution, and cross-data center collaboration, optical interconnect will increasingly upgrade from a "communication equipment cyclical product" to a rigid bottleneck asset of AI computing power infrastructure.**

It is worth noting that Ciena, Marvell, Lumentum, and Coherent all belong to the AI optical interconnect/optical communication infrastructure supply chain, but they occupy different positions within the industry. Marvell is more focused on underlying semiconductors: optical DSP, coherent-lite DSP, PAM4 DSP, switching chips, SerDes, custom AI ASICs, and silicon photonics platforms; Lumentum and Coherent are more focused on optical devices/optical modules/lasers/transceivers and other optical hardware. **Ciena, on the other hand, is more like a platform-based optical interconnect/optical communication company that focuses on a complete set of optical systems for data centers and coherent optical transmission, with core capabilities in WaveLogic coherent optical engines, 800G/1.6T coherent transmission, optical network equipment, routing and switching, network automation, and operator/cloud service provider network ecosystem solutions, rather than simply selling optical chips or core lasers.**

Therefore, **Ciena is more inclined towards "system-level AI optical interconnect and DCI," and the company's traditional strengths are more focused on high-speed interconnection DCI between different data centers, metropolitan/long-distance/operator backbone networks, and cloud service provider WAN interconnections, which connect multiple data centers, campuses, regional clouds, and telecom networks using high-speed coherent optical systems. However, Ciena is extending from "DCI between data centers" to "high-speed optical interconnect within AI data centers."** Its acquisition of Nubis aims to expand its inside-the-data-center strategy to address AI workloads; the industry trend is also pushing the optical signal chain from between machine rooms, buildings, and campuses, gradually approaching cabinets, switching chips, and even advanced packaging systems.

## 1.6T DCI, CPO, and high-speed optical interconnect in data centers ignite a new investment theme in the computing power supply chain

Looking at Ciena within the entire AI optical interconnect infrastructure supply chain, its position is closer to a system-level beneficiary of "WAN + DCI between data centers + high-speed interconnect around/inside data centers," while Marvell is more inclined towards "chip-level/module-level/switching chips/optical DSP/ASIC/silicon photonics" as the semiconductor foundation. Ciena itself has clearly positioned its long-term strategy as high-speed connections both within and outside data centers, and through the acquisition of Nubis, it has entered the CPO/NPO and high-speed copper interconnect segments closer to AI clusters; Nubis technology includes CPO/NPO optical modules with a maximum full-duplex bandwidth of 6.4Tb/s, as well as active copper cable solutions supporting 200Gb/s per channel and up to 4 meters in length, aimed at addressing power consumption, density, and latency constraints in AI cluster scale-up and scale-out ![1780576911(1).png](https://imageproxy.pbkrs.com/https://img.zhitongcaijing.com/image/20260604/1780576958373534.png?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/interlace,1/resize,w_1440,h_1440/quality,q_95/format,jpg)

**Ciena's strong performance is highly consistent with the recent strong revaluation logic of Marvell in the market: the bottleneck of AI infrastructure is expanding from pure GPU computing power to connections, switches, optical modules, DSP, SerDes, CPO, DCI, and network power consumption.** As AI training and intelligent agent workloads drive GPU clusters from single racks to multiple racks, multiple data centers, and even cross-regional AI factories, **data traffic will explode in a three-layer structure—low-power high-speed interconnections are needed within chips/racks, high radix switching and optoelectronic collaboration are required within data centers, and between data centers, a series of AI optical interconnection infrastructures such as 1.6T-level coherent-lite, DCI interconnections, and long-distance coherent optical transmission, even CPO, are needed.**

Morgan Stanley's latest expectations highlight that as AI agents become popular worldwide, the main line of AI computing power investment is shifting from "a single-point computing power competition around AI GPUs" to "full-stack computing power systems driven by AI agents." The supply chain bottleneck at the level of AI computing power infrastructure has **expanded from "large-scale purchases of GPUs/ASICs" to "striving to simultaneously address the entire delivery process of AI data centers, including power equipment, liquid cooling, data center CPUs, DRAM/NAND/HBM, optical communication/optical interconnection, high-performance Ethernet network infrastructure/data center DCI high-speed interconnections, transformers, gas turbines, etc.," especially the storage base and optical interconnection system are currently the biggest bottlenecks in data center computing power systems.**

Jensen Huang's predictions about the development trends in the AI computing power field are also an important basis for the market's increasing optimism towards leaders in the AI optical interconnection industry chain like Marvell. He pointed out that the commercialization of AI has entered the era of "AI agent-led Useful AI," which means that token production can not only drive R&D experiments but also bring real profits. As AI tasks are broken down and run in a distributed manner, the demand for "massive interconnections" has exceeded the scope of single-node upgrades, making system-level expansion the focus of design.

In a subsequent joint speech, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang's dialogue with Marvell Technology CEO profoundly explained the trend of the AI computing power industry chain fully upgrading to "connectivity" as the core bottleneck, revealing the fundamental logic behind why Jensen Huang is extremely optimistic about Marvell and chooses to deepen cooperation, even directly making a $2 billion strategic investment

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