Mr. Huang has said he wants to connect entire data centers together into one gigantic chip.
To do that you have to get latency between chips and then between servers as close to zero as possible.
From CNBC, March 2:
Nvidia is investing a combined $4 billion in Coherent and Lumentum, two photonics companies. Each company will receive $2 billion each from the chip giant as part of the strategic investment. Nvidia is investing a combined $4 billion in two companies developing photonics technologies, as it looks to shore up research pipelines and supply chains to support the major AI infrastructure buildout.
The U.S. chip giant announced on Monday it’s investing $2 billion in Lumentum and the same amount in Coherent.
Both companies are developing optics technology — systems which generate or transmit light and are used in functions like sensing and data transfer.
Lumentum is a U.S.-based company that is developing optical and photonic technologies to power the networks and infrastructure behind AI, cloud computing and next-generation communications.
Coherent, also based in the U.S., develops photonics technology, which refers to harnessing light (photons) to create components and systems that enable high-performance optical applications.
“Together with Lumentum, NVIDIA is advancing the world’s most sophisticated silicon photonics to build the next generation of gigawatt-scale AI factories,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said in a statement....
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A third player, Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) is up even more than the two names in the headline.
This network stuff is not new. You may recall that Nvidia purchased networking gear specialist Mellanox for just under $7 billion in 2019, back when a billion was real money.
"Connecting The Dots On Why Nvidia Is Buying Mellanox" (NVDA)
A year later we saw Mellanox InfiniBand system interconnects in five of the world's top ten fastest supercomputers. (and more than half of the Top500).
In the most recent earnings report, "NVIDIA Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript - February 25, 2026 (NVDA)" this was highlighted:
Networking revenue -- $11 billion for the quarter, over 3.5x year over year; full-year Networking exceeded $31 billion, up more than 10x versus fiscal 2021 (year of Mellanox acquisition [sic]).
n.b. 2020 was the year Mellanox was integrated into NVDA, not 2021.
Mr. Huang is not fooling around.
Related, June 2024:
