This Is My Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock to Buy in June (Hint: It's Not Micron Technology) - The Globe and Mail

This article focuses on key artificial intelligence (AI) stocks to watch in June 2026, with a detailed analysis of Ciena and Micron Technology. While Micron has seen significant stock gains due to ris... Read original →

Ciena’s surge reflects the unavoidable bottleneck shift from compute to optical interconnect in AI clusters. While HBM and GPU stacking boost local density, without Ciena’s coherent optics for inter-node traffic, training scales hit a 'network wall' after the 'memory wall.' Technically, its 400G ZR+ deployments are accelerating commercialization of thin-film lithium niobate modulators, pressuring Intel and NVIDIA to fast-track co-packaged optics. Geopolitically, U.S. export controls on advanced photonics benefit Ciena near-term via non-China cloud orders but inflate long-term supply chain redundancy costs. Facing price aggression from Infinera and Huawei (leveraging Taiwan, China fabs), Ciena must lock in hyperscalers via software-defined optical layers. Over the next 18 months, as AI training shifts to multi-site architectures, optical capex will exceed 25% of data center budgets—making Ciena’s rich valuation a premium for structural scarcity, not speculation.