Optical communication shares notched sharp gains in Thursday’s session. AXT Inc surged above 22%, Applied Optoelectronics climbed over 17% and Astera Labs, Inc. advanced more than 16%. Lumentum rose upwards of 15%, Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd gained over 13%, while Coherent posted a 12%-plus increase. Ciena was up more than 11%, Nokia Oyj rallied over 9%, and Corning closed 8% higher.

In related news, Wendell P. Weeks, President and Chief Executive Officer of Corning, recently stated that demand for optical communication products remains robust with orders picking up speed. Should vertically scaled networks migrate from the existing all-copper architecture to an all-fiber setup, the total fiber deployment per GPU would hit 160 strands — ten times the fiber volume deployed in today’s horizontally scaled networks. Given the prevailing hybrid network configurations in real-world deployments, fiber demand for each single GPU is projected to expand by 1.3x to 1.5x by 2028.