Aeluma positive on QD lasers despite impact of US government shutdown

Aeluma, a developer of high-performance indium phosphide (InP) photonic components located near Santa Barbara, California, has reported a “major uptick” in commercial interest at the start of 2026, thanks to the wider industry investment in AI data centers and a shortage of InP lasers.

Announcing the Nasdaq-listed firm’s financial results for the opening quarter of the year, CEO Jonathan Klamkin said:

“The massive AI data center buildout is outpacing the scale of the photonics supply chain. Customers are considering our technology to address near-term supply gaps, and for long-term growth opportunities.

“The industry is experiencing constraints around indium phosphide technology that we highlighted years ago - and that dynamic is creating both urgency and opportunity for Aeluma."

Manufacturing partners

While the seven-year-old company is tiny compared with the likes of Lumentum or Coherent, posting sales of $1.2 million in the March quarter, Klamkin appears confident of a significant upturn, saying:

“We have made considerable progress in our commercialization path with important manufacturing partnerships to enable scaling, [and] with six new development engagements totaling $5 million in value, we have already met our objective of onboarding three to seven new contracts for fiscal 2026.”

That contrasts with the negative impact of government shutdowns in the US, something that caused initial start-of-work for several projects to be postponed.

Aeluma is now partnering with both Tower Semiconductor and Sumitomo Chemical Advanced Technology, and working on a contract awarded by US government agencies to accelerate the scaling of its heterogeneous integration platform for laser, high-speed datacom, and quantum applications.

The company also received NASA funding to accelerate commercialization of integrated quantum dot (QD) lasers for silicon photonics. That two-year project is a collaboration with the University of Delaware, and proposes to advance QD lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) compatible with foundry-level silicon photonics platforms.

NASA applications include space-qualified optical communications, astronomy, docking, ranging, and sensing, where QD devices are expected to reduce size, weight, power, and cost while delivering superior performance in extreme environments.

Future commercial applications of the same technology could include secure free-space optical links, lidar for autonomous vehicles, datacom transceivers, and future quantum communication systems, with interest in QD lasers “surging” because of their potential to improve power handling, increase reliability, and eliminate optical isolators.

Filling the InP gap

Discussing Aeluma’s latest results with investors, Klamkin said that because of the boom in demand from AI data centers, InP laser vendors were “sold out”, with the likes of Lumentum and Coherent looking to add InP wafer capacity rapidly thanks in part to major backing from key player Nvidia.

However, the CEO also pointed to some major hurdles standing in the way, not least the time it takes to add that kind of fabrication facility capacity and the relative limitations of switching to 6-inch diameter wafer production.

“Many claim this won’t provide sufficient supply to meet market demand,” Klamkin told investors, adding that there was currently a major shortage of InP substrates of all sizes.

“Suppliers are sold out for years with only limited increase in capacity expected in the near term, and geopolitics adding a degree of uncertainty,” he added, while pointing out that Aeluma’s untypical approach could ramp production in a different way.

Crucially, the company uses metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) rather than molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to produce QD lasers, thus tapping into technology already used for decades to make LEDs and VCSEL sources.

“Our proprietary platform combines the advantages of compound semiconductors with scalable microelectronics manufacturing,” Klamkin said. “We can produce photonics at large volumes with an outsourced supply chain, or we can partner with customers that have their own manufacturing infrastructure.”

Examples of Aeluma’s product offering fabricated without using InP substrates include microLEDs, micro VCSELs, silicon microring modulators, and InGaAs photodiode arrays.