Growth driven by optics and physical AI

Research evidence excerpt

Growth driven by optics and physical AI

Macquarie Equity Research Anritsu

Earnings estimates

Optical transceiver testers for AI data centre market a key growth driver

We understand that investor attention within Anritsu’s Network Infrastructure business

is increasingly focused on the company’s long-term roadmap from 800G to 1.6T, 3.2T and

eventually CPO (Co-Packaged Optics), particularly the growth potential of its 3.2T and CPO-

related businesses.

In our view, the key driver for Anritsu’s Network Infrastructure segment is how long the

bandwidth upgrade cycle in AI data centres can continue. As long as AI networking bandwidth

keeps expanding, Anritsu should be able to benefit from successive product opportunities

across the 800G→1.6T→3.2T→CPO roadmap.

We understand CPO-related sales growth potential should not be viewed in the same way as

semiconductor back-end equipment or probe cards, which are more directly linked to GPU

shipments, HBM stack counts or wafer starts. Rather, its growth is driven by testing demand

associated with faster optical interconnects and expanding network investments in AI data

centres. The company’s key products, including optical transceiver testers and high-speed

interface measurement systems, support the development, validation and manufacturing

processes required as bandwidth increases. In this sense, AI infrastructure investment itself is

the underlying growth driver.

AI networking demand is also becoming increasingly important relative to compute

performance alone. Larger model sizes, wider adoption of MoE (Mixture of Experts)

architectures, expansion of inference clusters, rising east-west traffic and higher GPU-to-GPU

communication intensity are driving rapid growth in data-centre interconnect demand. Our