Goldman Sachs: Optical networking could grow tenfold by 2028

Goldman Sachs' identification of optical networking as a trillion-dollar opportunity reflects a broader shift in AI investment thinking. While much of the recent investor focus has centered on large language models and AI software—companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others building the applications themselves—the research suggests that the unglamorous infrastructure layer underpinning AI systems may offer comparable or greater growth. As AI models scale and require more computational power and data movement, the bottleneck increasingly becomes not the algorithms but the pipes carrying data between servers. Optical networking directly addresses this need by enabling high-speed, high-capacity data transmission essential to AI clusters. The forecast of more than tenfold growth by 2028 suggests Goldman Sachs expects this infrastructure build-out to accelerate alongside continued AI development. Lumentum, mentioned as a potential beneficiary, appears to operate in a less-crowded corner of the AI supply chain compared to chip makers and cloud platforms, which may explain why it is not yet a household name among retail AI investors despite the firm's optimism about its sector.