Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Lumentum makes the lasers and optical parts that let the internet move huge amounts of data and let phones and cars sense the world around them.
Lumentum builds the light-based hardware that sits inside the machines powering modern life. If you have ever streamed a video or sent a photo, your data probably passed through a component that Lumentum made. The company sells two main things: optical parts for the telecom and data-center networks that carry internet traffic, and lasers used in things like phone cameras, car sensors, and factory tools.
The first business is the engine. Phone and internet companies, along with the giant data centers run by companies like Microsoft and Amazon, need to send enormous amounts of data across long distances and between racks of servers. Lumentum makes the tiny lasers and optical chips that turn electrical signals into light and back again, so data can race down glass fibers instead of copper wires. Each year we ask networks to carry more, and light-based gear is how they keep up. This demand has been booming lately because of artificial intelligence: AI data centers need far more fast optical connections, and Lumentum has been selling heavily into that buildout. The second business is sensing. Lumentum makes vertical-cavity lasers — small, cheap light sources that measure distance and motion. The best-known use is the face unlock on iPhones; Apple has been a major customer. These lasers also go into cars for driver-assistance sensors and into industrial equipment for cutting and marking materials. This part of the business is steadier but lumpier — it depends on a few big customers and their product cycles.
Lumentum started life in 2015 as a piece of a much bigger company, JDS Uniphase, a giant in optical gear. Its family tree went back decades, to a laser maker called Uniphase that later joined with JDS Fitel. But the parent company had grown slow and sprawling, and the plan was to break it apart.
On the first day of August 2015, JDSU handed out its Lumentum shares to its own shareholders, and Lumentum became a public company on its own. The slow, steady testing business stayed behind as a company called Viavi, while Lumentum walked away with the optical communications and commercial laser products.
Right after the split, people guessed that rival Finisar would simply buy Lumentum, but Finisar choked on the price. Investors got nervous and the stock sank to fourteen dollars. Then Lumentum proved it could thrive alone, the stock shot up, and analysts admitted the two companies might have been too much alike to ever merge well.
In 2018 Lumentum went shopping and bought Oclaro, picking up laser technology and the building blocks that turn light into a way to carry information.
By 2022 Lumentum was buying again, adding NeoPhotonics and the telecom transmission product line from IPG Photonics.
The next year brought Cloud Light, a maker of optical modules for connecting data centers. This was a bigger step than it looked: Lumentum had been selling single laser chips, and now it could sell fully assembled optical transceivers straight to the giant cloud companies, putting it in place for the coming boom in AI data centers.
In February 2025, Michael Hurlston became CEO, taking over from the company's first CEO, Alan Lowe. Hurlston had run Synaptics and had deep roots at Finisar, and he brought a chipmaker's way of thinking, pushing Lumentum to become a fully integrated systems partner for the companies building AI chips.
After telecom spending fell hard in 2023 and early 2024, Lumentum turned itself into a key maker of the light engines at the heart of giant AI data centers, with its lasers and optical switches sitting right in the middle of cloud spending. Revenue had dropped by nearly a quarter, then climbed back sharply, and the stock roared from around forty dollars back to record highs above seven hundred.
In March 2026, Nvidia announced a strategic partnership and a $2 billion investment in Lumentum to push optics technology forward for the next generation of AI data centers. The money backed research and U.S. manufacturing, and it came with multibillion-dollar commitments to buy Lumentum's lasers and optical parts. The stock hit a new high that day.
In November 2026, Marvell Technology agreed to buy Lumentum in an all-stock deal worth about $115 billion, the largest deal ever in optical communications. Lumentum holders would get Marvell shares at a healthy premium and own about a third of the combined company. The idea was to combine Marvell's chips and interconnects with Lumentum's lasers and switches into one full-stack AI connectivity platform, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2028.
Lumentum has a real edge in making these parts at scale and at high quality, but it is not a cozy business. It sells into markets where prices fall fast, and it competes with bigger players like Coherent and Fabrinet. Its fortunes swing with the spending plans of a handful of powerful customers: when a phone maker changes designs or a data-center giant pauses orders, sales can lurch. That makes Lumentum a cyclical company — great when the buildout is on, painful when it stalls. It has spent money on acquisitions to widen its product line and on building factories, and it has bought back its own shares at times to support the stock. The simple story: Lumentum sells the light, and the world keeps needing more of it.
Saved answer · last researched 29 Oct 2026