Nvidia Earnings Tonight: The $POET, $LITE, $COHR Listen List

Nvidia Earnings Tonight: What to expect when you’re expecting

Nvidia $NVDA reports fiscal Q2 2027 tonight after the close. The Street wants $2.09 in adjusted EPS on roughly $92 billion in revenue. That's up about 97% from a year ago. Nvidia guided $91 billion. So consensus sits less than a point above the company's own midpoint. That's the problem. When the market's number is basically the company's number, a routine beat buys you nothing.

The setup is tense. The stock just snapped a seven-session losing streak, its longest since 2022. It has fallen the day after each of its last four reports. Options price a 5.6% move either way. On a company this size, that's roughly $286 billion of market cap riding on one print. Everything around Nvidia trades off Nvidia. No group is more levered to tonight's call than the optical names.

The bar isn't the quarter. It's the guide.

Data center revenue should land near $85.4 billion, up more than 105%. Fine. Nobody doubts the quarter. The fight is over the fiscal Q3 guide. Published consensus sits near $104 billion. The whisper runs higher. Jefferies models $108 billion. UBS thinks it can clear $110 billion. Morgan Stanley figures the new Vera Rubin platform alone could add close to $9 billion in the guided quarter. So a $104 billion guide could read as a miss. A number that would've been science fiction two years ago.

The clean bullish outcome is simple. Blackwell Ultra stays supply-constrained while Rubin ramps on schedule. Rubin production shipments start in fiscal Q3. The bigger ramp runs through Q4 and into early 2027. Any wobble in that timeline hits the whole AI complex. On-schedule and sold-out lifts everything downstream.

Why the optical names care more than most

Most previews skip this part. Nvidia's networking business is growing faster than its compute business. Last quarter, data center compute did $60.4 billion. Networking did $14.8 billion and grew 199% year over year. That networking line is where the optical story lives. NVLink and the scale-up fabric. Spectrum-X on the scale-out side. And now Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics in production. Every dollar of GPU spend drags interconnect spend behind it. More of that interconnect is light, not copper, every quarter.

Nvidia hasn't been subtle about it. In March it put $2 billion each into Coherent $COHR and Lumentum $LITE. That's $4 billion to lock down its optical supply chain as co-packaged optics moves from slideware to production. It signed a multi-year fiber deal with Corning $GLW in May. When the buyer of record writes equity checks to its suppliers, that tells you which bottleneck it fears.

The $LITE and $COHR listen list

For holders of the two big supplier names, the quarter matters less than three things on the call.

First: networking growth versus compute. If networking keeps outgrowing the GPU line, the optical attach story is intact. That's the most direct read-through in the release.

Second: Rubin ramp language. Rubin is where co-packaged optics and the denser scale-up fabrics start pulling real volume. Lumentum has disclosed an optical circuit switch backlog above $400 million. It also booked a CPO order for first-half 2027 delivery. Coherent's datacenter and communications segment grew 41% last quarter. That's now three-quarters of revenue, and the company is doubling its indium phosphide capacity. All of that capacity math assumes Rubin lands on time. A confirmed schedule is the whole ballgame.

Third: any talk of power and interconnect as constraints. Jensen Huang has spent two years saying the data center is the unit of compute. When he talks about connecting millions of GPUs, that's an optics statement. He doesn't have to name a supplier.

The $POET read-through

POET Technologies $POET doesn't sell to Nvidia. Nothing tonight changes POET's own numbers. What tonight can change is the size and urgency of the market POET is building into. POET's optical interposer sits squarely in the transition this call will orbit. Copper is running out of physics at AI-cluster distances. The industry's answer is more optics, packaged closer to the silicon.

POET's disclosed facts frame the leverage. Six straight quarters of sequential revenue growth, up 112% year over year in Q2. A $50 million initial purchase order from Lumilens. A framework the companies have sized at up to $500 million over five years. Lumilens is now out of stealth after a $700 million-plus Series C. And $796.3 million in cash funds the Malaysia capacity build against that ramp. A strong Nvidia networking print doesn't put revenue in POET's next release. It does confirm the demand curve those investments aim at. That's the read-through. No more, no less.

How we're treating tonight

One discipline point, because we repeat it for a reason. The first tick isn't information. Nvidia has beaten consensus in 10 of its last 11 quarters. It still traded red the next day in six of the last eight. The optical names will gap on the headline and re-price on the transcript. The transcript is where the networking mix, the Rubin schedule, and the CPO talk actually live. If you own $LITE, $COHR, or $POET, tonight isn't about Nvidia's EPS. It's about whether the biggest buyer of AI infrastructure just told you the light-speed part of the buildout is speeding up. Read the call.