Lumentum to Acquire Cloud Light to Accelerate Data Center Speed and Scalability - Seite 2

“Today’s announcement is a pivotal milestone in the history of Cloud Light, and a testament to the hard work and dedication of our employees,” said Dr. Dennis Tong, Cloud Light Founder and CEO. “We founded the company with a vision that our deep expertise in high-volume precision manufacturing would result in a superior value proposition for cloud data center customers. Having worked closely with the technology teams within leading cloud operators, we believe we can build upon our success to date and further accelerate cloud data center growth by combining Lumentum’s advanced photonic integration and transmission technologies with our highly automated packaging and manufacturing processes. We look forward to joining the Lumentum team and beginning an exciting new chapter.”

Compelling Strategic and Financial Benefits

• Captures AI inflection with expanded intra-data center opportunity: The highly complementary combination squarely positions Lumentum as a leader in providing photonics to cloud operators, enabling more than a five-fold expansion in the company’s served opportunity inside of data centers. With the advent of generative AI, cloud network needs for 400G and higher speed optical transceivers have accelerated rapidly, with the opportunity for these intra-data center products anticipated to grow at a 30% CAGR and exceed $10B by 2028. Cloud Light provides the highest speed optical transceiver products to leading hyperscale cloud customers, with even higher-speed solutions well along in their development, complementing Lumentum’s existing portfolio of laser transmitters and other integrated components for data center transceivers.

• Better equipped to address future customer roadmaps: AI models are driving an exponential increase in compute requirements, where performance is now doubling every 3 to 4 months, compared to the historical doubling every two years according to Moore’s Law. Scaling workloads even higher is limited by existing network and interconnect bottlenecks. With the addition of Cloud Light, Lumentum better addresses these challenges – both now and into the future – by combining advanced optical interconnect technologies based on chip-scale photonic integration, together with highly automated packaging and manufacturing technologies.

• More strategic partner to cloud and AI infrastructure customers: With Cloud Light, Lumentum can more effectively address the growing and diverse needs of cloud operator and AI infrastructure providers. This includes providing next-generation optical connectivity and optical switching within data centers, as well as coherent pluggable modules and optical line system components for data center interconnect applications. With Lumentum’s vertical integration capabilities in components and diversity in its global manufacturing footprint, customers can benefit from improved security of supply and superior technology and cost roadmaps.

• Amplifies edge and metro networking opportunities: Cloud Light’s proven capabilities in low-cost product development and high-volume manufacturing are relevant not only for cloud data center and data center interconnect solutions, but also for network edge applications, including those served by direct detect and coherent tunable DWDM transceivers. A broader set of networking customers will benefit from the added advanced packaging technologies and manufacturing capabilities offered by this combination.

• Immediately accretive to Lumentum’s earnings and accelerates Lumentum growth: The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Lumentum’s non-GAAP earnings per share and is expected to more than double Lumentum’s cloud data center infrastructure revenue in the 12-month period following the transaction close. In the last twelve months, over 90 percent of Cloud Light’s revenue was derived from 400G and higher speed products, and in their most recent quarter, over half of Cloud Light’s optical transceiver revenue was derived from 800G transceiver products.

Transaction Financing and Approvals