Jim Cramer has been circling POET Technologies (NASDAQ:POET) for months, intrigued by the pitch but refusing to bite. On the April 21, 2026 episode of Mad Money, he walked through the optical interposer story, the Lighteon collaboration, even the Wolfpack Research short report and the CFO rebuttal, and landed where institutional money tends to land on pre-revenue photonics: “an interesting story but I am not ready to recommend chasing it here.” Reddit disagrees. Loudly. POET ran from roughly $7 to $20 in two weeks, then surrendered most of that move. Somebody in this argument is about to be very wrong with real money.
What Cramer actually said
Cramer’s hesitation comes down to execution. He likes the theme, the scramble to secure lasers, and acknowledges that POET’s pitch to make optical packaging cheaper, smaller, and easier to scale aligns with what Jensen Huang has been saying about packaging integration in the AI buildout.
Cramer specifically flagged that POET has been at this for decades, that the road to becoming a durable supplier is long, and that Wolfpack Research accused the company of accumulating cash through dilution while generating little operating revenue. CFO Thomas Mika pushed back, citing a $5 million production order for 800G optical engines and invoices from Celestial AI. Then Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL | MRVL Price Prediction), which had just acquired Celestial AI, blew the rebuttal up.
The Marvell problem
On April 27, 2026, POET disclosed that Marvell had cancelled all Celestial AI purchase orders, citing alleged confidentiality breaches in POET’s own disclosures about the deal. The stock fell 45% in a single session, and class action lawsuits followed.
Reddit’s sentiment data captured the carnage in real time, with very_bearish scores of 8 to 12 on April 28 and 29, and a 1,503-upvote post titled “POET YOLO ‘fail’, being the top signal”. When management announced the Lumilens joint development agreement two weeks later, retail’s emotional muscle memory was already primed to chase the rebound.
The Reddit counter-argument
The bull case is concentrated, articulate, and almost entirely about what happens next. A May 19 wallstreetbets post titled “$POET bull is back! $40 before EOY” argued that POET just raised a “f–k Ton of capital” and could deploy roughly $400 million toward a U.S. factory, citing AAOI’s post-announcement run as precedent. The author also flagged the most recent dilution clearing at $21 a share as evidence that the days of $7.25 raises are over, and pointed to institutional buying at $20 as conviction. Aggregate Reddit sentiment hit 94 on May 15, with a viral post about 1000%+ gains driven by “prayer and signs”.
CEO Suresh Venkatesan provided the catalyst the bulls were waiting for. “The joint development agreement with Lumilens, including an initial $50 million purchase order for EOI-based optical engines, represents an important commercial milestone for the Company and establishes the framework for what we believe could become a substantial long-term supplier relationship supporting frontier AI infrastructure,” he said in the Q1 release.
The number that stops the bull case cold
POET’s Q1 FY2026 revenue came in at $503,389, up 201.9% year over year and beating the $347,970 estimate. The market cap on that revenue base is $2.27 billion. The quarterly net loss was $12.34 million, the EPS loss was $0.08 against a $0.04 estimate, and the accumulated deficit through Q3 2025 sat around $291 million. The Q1 6-K filing lays out the dependence on three customer partnerships (Lumilens, LITEON, Lessengers), the Malaysia production ramp, and the warrant-driven earnings volatility that keeps making GAAP numbers look stranger than they are.
The Lumilens deal itself has structural questions. A May 20 stockmarket subreddit post argued the $50 million PO came alongside options on more than 22 million POET shares at $8.25 over nine years, with 10% exercisable immediately, and noted that Lumilens had acquired Rain Tree Photonics roughly seven weeks earlier, an entity with less than $800,000 of revenue across three years. That post deserves scrutiny, but the specifics are testable, and any investor underwriting the bull thesis should test them.
Who loses money from here
A $2.27 billion enterprise priced on a half-million dollars of quarterly revenue requires the Lumilens framework, the Malaysia ramp, and the 30,000-engine shipment target to all land roughly on schedule.
Cramer’s discipline is to wait for proof. Reddit’s discipline is to front-run it. One of those approaches is going to be wrong by a lot, and the gap between $40 by year-end and a return to the pre-Lumilens base is where that money will change hands.
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