POET Technologies Stock: Buy This Under The Radar AI Play?
POET Technologies stock (NASDAQ: POET) surged by close to 10% on Monday and remains up by close to 60% over the last month. The company, which develops silicon photonics solutions that use light instead of electricity to move data between chips, has seen surging investor interest, driven by enthusiasm for artificial intelligence infrastructure plays, a recent $75 million capital raise, as well as a slew of new partnerships, which take the company closer to commercialization. So is the stock a buy at current levels?
POET stock has jumped meaningfully recently, but there is significant risk in relying on a single stock. However, there is a huge value to a broader, diversified approach we take with Trefis High Quality Portfolio. Separately, consider what could long-term performance for your portfolio be if you combined 10% commodities, 10% gold, and 2% crypto with equities.
What Poet Does
Interconnects are the physical links that transfer data between chips, servers, and systems inside data centers. Traditional electrical interconnects, which use copper wiring, are increasingly unable to keep up with the massive data transfer needs of AI workloads, as they face limits in speed, energy efficiency, and heat dissipation. These constraints lead to bandwidth bottlenecks, high energy consumption, and costly cooling requirements, restricting the scalability of AI infrastructure. However, optical interconnects, like those developed by Poet Technologies, replace electrical signals with light-based transmission, enabling multi-terabit data transfer speeds, lower power use, and reduced heat generation. This makes them vital for the next generation of AI and high-performance computing systems.
While there are other players in this market, including Ayar Labs, Celestial AI, and Ranovus, Poet’s Optical Interposer integrates photonics and electronics on a single wafer, addressing cost, scalability, and manufacturability challenges more effectively than rivals, by eliminating traditional costly photonics assembly steps. The company’s core innovation, the Optical Interposer, integrates electronic and photonic components on a single chip to enable 800G and 1.6T data transmission speeds for next-generation AI and high-performance computing systems.
Why The Stock Has Been Trending Higher
There have been a couple of factors that have driven the stock higher. The company just raised $75 million in new funding last week, and this could give it the resources to further its product development and scale up production. Poet has also forged strategic partnerships with Foxconn, Semtech, and notably Sivers Semiconductors in the recent past. The Foxconn deal is focused on developing 800G and 1.6T pluggable optical transceiver modules using Poet’s silicon photonics optical engine technology with Foxconn designing and manufacture the high-speed transceivers for global clients, leveraging their manufacturing expertise.
Poet and Semtech launched 1.6T high-performance optical receivers integrating Semtech’s FiberEdge 200G-per-lane receiver technology with Poet’s Optical Interposer platform. Poet recently entered a strategic collaboration with Sivers Semiconductors, combining Sivers’ high-power distributed feedback laser technology with Poet’s optical interposer platform as they aim to create scalable, cost-effective solutions for AI clusters and hyperscale data centers.
Valuation And Risks
Poet is still in the early stages of commercialization. The company generated less than $300,000 in revenue over Q2 2025. Over the last 12 month operating losses stood at $-28 million. Poet’s future depends heavily on successful product adoption and scaling up production, making it a pretty speculative play. Its valuation is stretched, with the stock trading at more than 60x projected 2026 revenue, leaving little margin for execution risk. With a market cap below $900 million, Poet also falls into the small-cap category, which can mean higher volatility and lower liquidity. Overall, Poet appears to be a high-risk, high-reward bet on the rise of AI infrastructure, although meaningful gains will depend on how well it executes on its product road map and converts partnerships into real revenue in the coming quarters.
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