Just a year ago, it was a small manufacturer of optical components that most of the market wasn’t even paying attention to. Today, this company has become one of the most heavily traded bets on the physical layer of artificial intelligence. The story hinges on a single turning point: demand for high-speed optical links within data centers for AI has exploded, and this company, by sheer coincidence, finds itself right at the heart of the industry’s bottleneck. The bottleneck today isn’t the transceivers themselves, but the lasers inside them—and this company is one of the few players that manufactures them in-house.

The result is a combination that can easily burn retail investors—or richly reward them. On the one hand, there’s rapid revenue growth (82.75% for 2025, with management targeting over $1 billion for 2026), vertical integration in laser manufacturing, and a balanced cash-rich balance sheet. On the other hand, the company is still operating at a loss, with deeply negative free…