The Machines Need Bandwidth
An AI agent that works while you sleep needs a network that works while you sleep. Multiply that across consumers and businesses, and the investment opportunity extends through the cables, optical components, and services carrying the traffic.
Two announcements on September 8 put money and engineering behind that thesis: Verizon’s multibillion-dollar fiber agreement with Corning, and Qualcomm’s AI infrastructure collaboration with Amazon.
We turn themes like this into options trades, with entry prices and exit plans. If you’d like to follow along, our Start Here page explains how it works.
Follow The Fiber
Verizon and Corning announced a multibillion-dollar supply agreement covering more than 80 million miles of optical fiber and connectivity solutions from 2027 through 2032. The network will serve homes and businesses while expanding the long-haul backbone connecting AI data centers. Corning’s high-density cables also let Verizon pack more fiber into existing conduit.
Qualcomm’s collaboration with Amazon covers multiple generations of custom silicon for AI inference, plus optical connectivity up to 1.6 terabits per second and future generations. Inference is the work of running trained models to produce answers and perform tasks. As AI becomes a service people use throughout the day, the connections feeding that work become part of the investment case.
These announcements span the network: links inside data centers, connections between them, and the broadband infrastructure reaching customers.
Your Agent Is Another Customer
Akram’s Razor raised the next step on Tuesday: consumer AI agents could create opportunities in traffic delivery, security, and observability. He singled out Fastly, Cloudflare, and Akamai.
Consider an agent comparing products, checking availability, retrieving documents, and monitoring changes on your behalf. One instruction can generate repeated interactions with other services. Businesses handling those requests need to identify the agent, control its access, deliver the response, and diagnose failures.
That makes agent adoption a plausible growth driver for the companies operating and securing those connections. The commercial test is how much of that activity becomes paid usage, and at what margin. Efficient agents could also use fewer page loads or retrieve cached information. Request growth, bandwidth growth, and revenue growth will depend on how these services are designed and priced.
The fiber commitments are here. The next question is who gets paid as the traffic arrives.
Where We Already Have Exposure
We opened bullish options trades on Corning (GLW 0.00%↑) and Coherent (COHR 0.00%↑ ) on May 29, and both positions remain open. Corning supplies the fiber and connectivity; Coherent supplies optical components and transceivers used in data centers and communications networks.
We also have an open bullish options trade on Credo Technology (CRDO) from July 7. Its electrical and optical connections help move data between servers and accelerator clusters.
All three positions use call spreads combined with put spreads, with defined maximum risk and capped upside. Their expirations run from November through January, so our investment horizon is much shorter than Verizon’s supply agreement. Stock performance and the timing of that performance determine the outcome of our trades.
Previous Winners
We’ve also booked gains on earlier trades in all three names. These were fully closed positions, separate from the trades we hold today. The cards below show each completed trade’s return on maximum risk and on premium outlay, with links to our final exit updates.
Corning: +55.7% on maximum risk; +138.8% on premium outlay
Coherent: +69.2% on maximum risk; +1,800% on premium outlay.
Credo: +161.6% on maximum risk; +433.7% on premium outlay
For the next round of opportunities, we’ll be watching suppliers turning network demand into orders and earnings, alongside service providers turning agent activity into paying customers. AI needs a bigger internet. We want exposure to the businesses collecting the checks for building and running it.