Anthropic's $65B ARR missed $80B+ whisper figures, triggering risk-off selling that sent Lumentum (LITE) down 10% and AXT (AXTI) down 12%. Fabrinet (FN) cratered 20% despite record Q4 revenue of $1.3 billion, up 45% year over year, as investors deemed its guidance too conservative. Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Corning didn't make the cut.
Grab the names FREE today. Optics stocks are getting hit hard at midday Tuesday as a risk-off wave washes through AI hardware names. Lumentum (NASDAQ:LITE) is down 10.1%, Corning (NYSE:GLW) is off 8.2%, and AXT (NASDAQ:AXTI) is down 12.5%.
Lumentum last traded near $877, AXT near $84. The catalyst is largely macro, not optics-specific in origin. Anthropic told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue reached $65 billion at the end of July, a huge number but below the whisper figures circulating in Silicon Valley.
On the All In Podcast, Gavin Baker said he had heard Anthropic's ARR was over $80 billion. then reported the company is estimating 2028 revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion, again a massive growth rate but likely behind buyside models. Baker and David Sacks said on the same show they expected Anthropic to exit next year at an ARR of $400 billion to $500 billion. Sacks and Baker don't speak for all of Silicon Valley, but their optimism vs. published figures is a disconnect that likely reflects what has been 'priced into' stocks versus what was just announced.
Recent ARR figures reported for OpenAI (about $40 billion), are also 'disappointing' versus the amount of spend the company is spinning up. Layered on top, the Wall Street Journal detailed how AI infrastructure liabilities are ballooning off the books. "Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings.
Those obligations are growing faster than traditional 'capex,' which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings." That capex is exactly what feeds the optics supply chain, and we profiled seven of the non-chip suppliers riding it in a free report here. Rates are not helping either. The 30-year Treasury hit 5.31% on Monday, a fresh multi-year high that pressures every long-duration growth name.
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