Nick

$AAOI is up 24% and $LITE is 5% since my thesis today. From BOM analysis, LITE ($27B) is levered toward TPU Ironwood due to OCS but benefits from NVDA + all ASICs. AAOI ($2.5B), is levered toward MSFT MAIA ramp and Amazon Trainium. InP like HBM, will be a bottleneck for 2026 as they’re the foundational materials used for lasers in these deployments. Similar to memory bottlenecks with Micron and SK Hynix, we’ll likely see attention drawn to InP fabs, such as $AAOI, which happens to be one of the sole ones in America (COHR,Macom) But compared to $LITE that is up 362% YTD due to the success of Google’s TPU (from Meta and Anthropic purchase orders), $AAOI is only up 7% YTD. We’re largely seeing this because there’s a lack of retail or media attention on the $AMZN Trainium or $MSFT Maia deployments, which are largely expected to ramp up in 2026-2027. However they’re all likely to succeed due to each hyperscaler wanting to lower costs of inference for their own cloud platform. If we see other hyperscalers adopt OCS for optimized performance that the TPU achieved, expect $LITE to re-rate more than they have now given their monopoly in that specific segment. However, if we see $MSFT Maia ramp up (given $AAOI is likely developing a new architecture for them), and $AMZN Trainium ramp up ($4B warrant + purchase orders), expect $AAOI to rerate. Photonics and InP will be the new bottleneck like memory. We’ll likely see investments pour down stream to players like $COHR, Innolight, $LITE, and hidden levered plays on specific hyperscaler ASICs like $AAOI as a theme in 2026. The market is currently rewarding the Google TPU supply chain but might be missing other hyperscaler ASIC ramps.

How much did you guys pay in “market tuition”? I’ll start - I didn’t lose money but I lost an entire year of growth and compounding trying to be a trader 🤣