Lumentum's optical components that move data between AI servers have capacity already committed through early 2029. Michael Hurlston, the chief executive, said this in an interview in Tokyo on Friday. Bloomberg reported the conversation, and the Japan Times carried the account the same day.
The company cannot meet about 70 percent of demand for some products through next year. It will still be unable to fill 30 percent of demand for other products through 2028. These are product-specific shortfalls. Six months earlier Hurlston had said Lumentum was on track to sell out capacity by 2028. The date has moved.
Hurlston told Bloomberg, "We are really trying to catch up, add capacity as fast as we can, but we are very, very far behind what customers want. We are completely sold out, so there's no end in sight."
Lumentum supplies advanced indium phosphide devices used for high-speed cloud computing and data transmission inside AI data centers. Nvidia invested $2 billion in the company earlier this year, and put the same amount into rival Coherent. Analysts on average expect Lumentum sales to more than double this year.
Tokyo-area production capacity has increased twelvefold.
Over the past two years Lumentum raised capacity twelvefold at its main factory in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It plans to invest at least $350 million in that site and a neighboring facility. The company has also expanded its plant in Caswell, England. Building a new production line of this kind takes three to five years. Hyperscalers have agreed to put capital behind longer commitments so the factory can expand.
Hurlston said the company will need to consider an acquisition in the next year if it wants to add capability beyond what the current plants can produce. Lumentum acquired part of its technology through the 2018 purchase of Oclaro, which had inherited Hitachi's optical research. The company describes its Sagamihara facility in Kanagawa Prefecture as one of the world's most advanced indium phosphide production sites.
A possible U.S. restriction on new Chinese optical transceiver models would tighten the market further. Counterpoint Research noted that Lumentum and Coherent would not be able to fill the volume left by Chinese makers such as Innolight if that restriction takes effect.
Optical availability can set the schedule for new AI capacity.
Every new GPU rack needs more optical links to move data at the speeds AI training and inference require. When supplier capacity for those links is already committed for more than two years, optical component availability can become a critical scheduling constraint for new large-scale AI infrastructure. Operators who treat AI as a pure software purchase can hit the same kind of wall that power and cooling already impose on data center builds.
The shortage raises a design question worth evaluating. One path is to keep building many similar AI stacks that all compete for the same scarce optics. Another is to stage the work so that different stages use different components. Training large models can stay on the high-end optical links inside the largest halls. Inference on smaller models, or retrieval and ranking steps, can run on equipment that does not need the same density of indium phosphide devices. The reporting does not show that staging avoids the specific shortages Hurlston described. It is a question to test against the supply your providers have already secured.
Ask your infrastructure and cloud providers whether constrained optical components could delay your planned AI capacity, what supply they have secured, and which workloads can run on existing infrastructure. Capacity already committed through early 2029 is not the same as components unavailable for delivery until 2029.
Works Cited
Bloomberg. "Nvidia-Backed Lumentum Sold Out of AI Server Parts Till 2029." Bloomberg, 9 Oct. 2026, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-09/nvidia-backed-lumentum-sees-opto-parts-capacity-sold-out-to-2029.
The Japan Times. "Nvidia-backed Lumentum sold out of AI server parts till 2029." The Japan Times, 9 Oct. 2026, www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/10/09/companies/lumentum-ai-server-sold-out/.
Quartz. "Lumentum AI optical components sold out through 2029." Quartz, 9 Oct. 2026, qz.com/lumentum-ai-data-center-optical-parts-sold-out-2029-100926.
NVIDIA. "NVIDIA Announces Strategic Partnership with Lumentum to Develop State-of-the-Art Optics Technology." NVIDIA Newsroom, 2 Mar. 2026, nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-strategic-partnership-with-lumentum-to-develop-state-of-the-art-optics-technology.
Bellamkonda, Shashi. "Asia-Pacific Needs $280 Billion to Build Data Centers Where the Power Is." shashi.co, 9 Oct. 2026, www.shashi.co/2026/10/asia-pacific-needs-280-billion-to-build.html.
