POET Technologies and Lumilens announced a supply agreement establishing a joint development partnership for wafer-level photonic integration technology targeting AI infrastructure applications.

The agreement includes an initial $50 million purchase order from Lumilens for manufacturing optical engines based on the companies' Electrical-Optical Interposer platform. The partnership framework could scale to $500 million in cumulative purchases over five years, according to the companies' statement.

POET Technologies shares surged 11.57% in extended trading after a 43% rally on Thursday.

As part of the arrangement, POET granted Lumilens a warrant to purchase up to 22,921,408 common shares at $8.25 per share over nine years. The warrant allows immediate exercise of 2,292,140 shares, with remaining shares vesting based on cumulative payments toward future purchase orders totaling up to $500 million.

The joint platform aims to address manufacturing constraints in optical engine production through alignment-free wafer-level processing. The companies plan to develop solutions ranging from 800G and 1.6T pluggable transceivers to Near-Package Optics and Co-Packaged Optics applications.

"GPU interconnects are emerging as the defining bottleneck for scaling AI, and addressing it requires rethinking the full optical stack — silicon, photonics, and packaging — together," said Ankur Singla, CEO and Founder of Lumilens.

Dr. Suresh Venkatesan, Chairman and CEO of POET Technologies, stated the platform "will allow us to jointly bring semiconductor-style manufacturing discipline to optical engines — delivering precision, scalability, and cost structure advantages that are essential for AI infrastructure at scale."

Engineering samples from the development program are expected in late 2026, with production ramp planned for 2027. Revenue fulfillment depends on successful development, qualification, and manufacturing scaling of the modules.