The photonics story is the one to sit with. NVIDIA committing $2B each to Coherent and Lumentum isn't a supply hedge, it's a structural lock-in play. Both companies now have multi-year revenue visibility baked in, which explains why COHR is up 15.4% on the week. The question is whether that capital actually expands capacity fast enough to matter for 2026 datacenter builds.
The H200 cap is the more immediate pressure point. If the 75,000-unit ceiling holds, ByteDance and Alibaba are chasing roughly half their stated demand through alternative channels. That redirects procurement toward whatever domestic or third-party silicon can absorb the shortfall, and we've been tracking the China open-protocol narrative gaining momentum as a parallel response. Worth watching whether that accelerates Alibaba's open-source model push as a way to reduce hardware dependency altogether.
Power is the quiet positive in today's setup. At $45/MWh, operators running continuous inference workloads are seeing real cost relief, even as the Memory Tension Index stays elevated. That combination, cheap power against tight memory, is an unusual split. It probably doesn't last, but for now it favors operators who are memory-constrained rather than power-constrained.