Optical‑First AI Infrastructure Consolidation

Big AI demand is shifting the hardware frontier from pure silicon compute to the connectivity layer, and firms are merging electrical and optical stacks to own end‑to‑end data movement. Large, strategic acquisitions (here Marvell buying Lumentum for an implied $115B) show companies are treating optical interconnects as the next core asset class for AI. — If optical connectivity becomes the bottleneck, consolidation will reshape competition, supply resilience, national industrial policy, and where AI compute jobs and investment locate.