Hardware Podcasts

EP 188: The Wild West of Optical, Cisco's AI Hack, and Is Compute an Investable Asset

The Circuit · 17 Aug 2026 · 56m · Episode 181

What this episode covers

Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze the optical networking sector, contrasting Lumentum's success with Coherent's struggles in transitioning to 6-inch indium phosphate wafers, while debating the adoption timelines for Near-Packaged Optics (NPO) versus Co-Packaged Optics (CPO). They discuss Cisco's resurgence driven by its Silicon One chips and a strategic partnership with Anthropic to use the Mythos model for security audits, and examine Applied Materials' strong earnings backed by Long-Term Agreements (LTAs), attributing guidance hesitation to Intel's pending capital plans. Finally, the hosts critique NVIDIA's $500 billion data center financing initiative and Jensen Huang's claim that compute is a non-obsolescent asset class, arguing that rapid hardware obsolescence makes such an investment model risky.

Most relevant to

large enterprises

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Lumentum, Coherent, Cisco, Anthropic, Applied Materials, Intel, NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Nebius
Products
Mythos
Chips
Silicon One
Also
Jensen Huang

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