POET Technologies Inc. — AI supply-chain exposure

POET Technologies designs optical engines and photonic integrated circuits around its Optical Interposer platform — a wafer-level, CMOS-compatible way to fuse electronic and photonic parts, including indium phosphide light sources, into a single module. That is the machinery that turns electrical signals into light for the short, dense links inside AI clusters. Its co-packaged and pluggable optics target the interconnect fabric that lashes accelerators together, aiming at the emerging generation of very high-speed pluggables and co-packaged optics.

Its structural hook is a bet on packaging photonics cheaply enough to scale. As clusters grow, moving light closer to the chip — co-packaged rather than pluggable — becomes the way to break the bandwidth and power wall, and POET's interposer is a claim on that transition. But the company is still essentially pre-revenue and has recently raised capital to build manufacturing capacity, so its chain weight reflects structural position in a scarce, hard-to-manufacture layer rather than realised output. It reads as a technology option on where interconnect is heading, not an incumbent supplier.