Where The AI Optics Trade Still Has Teeth

A Sanctum Research Desk ranking of the public photonics opportunity set, from current-value asymmetry to long-duration optionality.

Desk Verdict

Photonics is becoming one of the most important second-order AI infrastructure themes because the bottleneck is no longer only compute. It is bandwidth, power per bit, thermal density, optical packaging, reliability and qualified manufacturing capacity.

The mistake is buying every ticker with an optics slide. The opportunity is finding the companies where the engineering constraint is already turning into orders, revenue, margin leverage or customer lock-in.