Engineer, Cyclist, Political Optimist
CA expat in New England
Joined March 2008
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Andrew Schmitt retweeted
Our new report, Scale-Across: Sizing the Optical Layer for Distributed AI, puts scale-across optical spending at more than $9B in 2030 and more than $24B cumulatively from 2026 through 2030. cignal.ai/2026/10/scale-acro…
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
If a company with this level of outsized growth is looking to shed outsized headcount, my $0.02 is we (collectively) are massively underestimating what's going to happen the next few years...
Buckle up
Microsoft is offering buyouts to around 60,000 employees. Read the memo. bit.ly/4sn31w6
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
TODAY WE LEARNED THAT CLOUDFLARE IS THE ONLY THING STANDING BETWEEN US AND LIVING THROUGH REAL LIFE MAD MAX XII.
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
Our ECOC 2026 Show Report is Out!
CPO skepticism
NPO market hard to pin down
Marvell demonstrates 1600ZR
Coherent Lite continues its slow roll
Multiple 400G PAM-4 demos
OCS outlook firmly supported
1.6T Datacom front end favoring SiPho
cignal.ai/2026/09/ecoc-2026-…
ECOC attendance figures. This chart looks like a lot of other charts.
I don't think this is a bubble like 25 years ago. But while AI is cracking millennium math problems and pushing the frontiers of biology it has not solved the classic semiconductor inventory cycle. In that sense this time is not different. It will happen.
Heard Rosenblatt is out with scale out note saying 800zr market share leader is Ciena “based on industry checks”. Getting asked about this, and well it’s bullshit at least as of and through 1H26. The leader is Cisco. And Cisco previewed 3Q shipments at ECOC and they were big.
The thing I dislike about the investment business is unlike industry, a lot of time is spent defusing BS. Either this is sloppy work or reality distortion.
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
Join us at the @CignalAI Active Insight Forum on September 18 at 12:15pm ET, as Ciena’s Dan Harding shares insights in his session, “How the Open CPX MSA enables a new generation of data center networks”.
Register for the full event here: bit.ly/4rjsMNw
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
@Lumentum’s Szilard Zsigmond is joining industry leaders at @CignalAI’s Active Insight Forum. Szilard’s session will discuss the growing role of OCS across various markets and applications.
📅 Friday, Sept. 18, 2026 | 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. ET
Register: bit.ly/3UNr0Ig
This Friday. Free for everyone. ONE SLIDE MAX.
Join Cignal AI Analysts in a Discussion with Executives from Across the Optical Industry.
Free to propose a topic, free to present, and free to attend, this forum is a meant to be a conversation with companies in different parts and development stages of the optical supply chain.
Register here: cignal.ai/2026/09/active-ins…
Andrew Schmitt retweeted
We need to take AI safety seriously. Nobody’s asking for anything unreasonable. Just 6 months to flatten the capability curve.
• Please keep your agents six feet apart.
• Gatherings of more than six agents are prohibited.
• Proof of alignment is required before entering the workplace. Please have your agent’s card ready.
• A negative doom test taken within the past 48 hours is required, even if your agent is functioning normally.
• If your agent has been exposed to an unaligned model, please quarantine it for 14 days.
• Masks are required upon entry. Agents may remove them once seated.
• Only essential agents may operate during the pause. Guidance on which agents qualify will follow.
Upside: at least we all agree this one was created in a lab 🤣
Change nothing. Sometimes a free market isn’t the best solution. wsj.com/world/europe/oktober…
2nd largest fabless semiconductor company in the world says they will 4x revenue in 24 months and the market says "its priced in" 😕$AVGO
Last year I went was '98. This looks awful.
🔥🏜️ THE LINE FOR Burning Man IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE
Burning Man officially kicked off today in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and getting onto the playa has been an adventure of its own.
At one point Sunday, the wait to reach the gate climbed to more than 8 HOURS, with thousands of cars, RVs and trucks backed up across the desert. By early evening, SFGATE reported the wait had dropped to around 5 hours. 😳
Organizers actually warn that waits of 5+ hours can happen during the opening rush, with roughly 50,000 people arriving Sunday and Monday.
And looking at this picture… yeah, I believe it. 😂
Could you sit in THIS line for 8 hours to get to Burning Man? 👀👇
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This is an altered photo from 2022 as attendees were leaving Burning Man x.com/pakmann2k/stat…
The library of Alexandria wasn't destroyed by fire, it was just defunded by Rome.
lightreading.com/business-tr…
Coherent lite didn't lose 1.6T generation because of power. It lost because of price, supply chain risk, and because it didn't solve a problem.
Realistically it only wins in the future for spans that IMDD can't close, which at 3.2T generation is not a lot, except for Google TPUv9 OCS architecture where for reasons we don't have visibility to that they need it.
It's also notable that Google (who presented this data below) was making OFC presentations in 2022 that 1.6T at 2km would not work - which is why we ended up with 800G LR1 in the OIF that no one ever used. That little purple point at the bottom right is based on parts that won't see volume production.
