Key points
- Short seller Ningi Research says roughly 31% (SEK 97 million) of Sivers Semiconductors' (SIVEF) 2025 revenue is dubious, and two US law firms are investigating possible securities claims.
- Sweden's Economic Crime Authority is separately probing a leak that let an anonymous X account reveal Sivers' Nasdaq listing plans 48 hours early, and the listing vote was pulled from the June 2026 AGM.
- CEO Vickram Vathulya and all five board members bought shares on July 9, 2026, after a year in which the stock ranged from $0.96 to $11.25.
- Sivers has real CPO design partnerships with GlobalFoundries and O-Net/Enablence but no CPO revenue yet, while Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) is up more than 400% in 2026, Lumentum (LITE) just posted 66% revenue growth, and Nvidia alone put $2 billion into Coherent (COHR), more than Sivers' entire market cap.
There's been a lot of chatter around Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) lately, so I wanted to actually dig into what's going on with the company. What I found is not a clean story. Most of the time, when a CEO and a full slate of directors buy shares on the same day, it is a clean signal that leadership thinks the stock is cheap. Sivers does not offer that kind of signal. Its executives bought shares on July 9, 2026, in the middle of a market abuse investigation in Sweden, a board exodus, a short seller's revenue allegations, and two American law firms circling for a possible class action. The same company is also sitting on two real technology partnerships in co-packaged optics, or CPO, the connector technology AI data centers are racing to adopt. Both stories are true at the same time, and untangling them says more about where this stock actually stands than either one alone.
What's actually going on at Sivers
Sivers Semiconductors makes laser chips, the kind used to send data over fiber inside data centers. Through the first half of 2026 the stock became one of the more violent trades on the Stockholm exchange. Shares that traded under a dollar earlier in the year spiked into double digits before crashing back down, a run that briefly gave the company a market value far bigger than its sales could justify. The OTC-listed shares have ranged from $0.96 to $11.25 over the past year and traded around $4.39 as of this writing (market open, July 15), a market cap of roughly $1.3 billion. Prices move fast on this stock, so treat any single quote here as a snapshot, not current.
The trouble started in April, when an anonymous account on X posted details of Sivers' plan to pursue a secondary listing on the Nasdaq in New York, roughly 48 hours before the company's own announcement. Sweden's Economic Crime Authority and its financial regulator opened an investigation into whether that leak violated the EU's Market Abuse Regulation. A state prosecutor called the trading pattern around the leak "striking" and said the premature disclosure resembled patterns seen in past pump-and-dump cases.
The Nasdaq listing vote itself never happened. Sivers pulled it from the agenda of its June 15, 2026 annual general meeting at the last minute, and the plan is effectively on ice while the leak investigation continues.
The same meeting saw a board shake-up. Vice chairman Tomas Duffy and founders Erik Fallström and Keith Halsey all resigned just before it. Shareholders re-elected Bami Bastani as chairman along with directors Karin Raj and Todd Thomson, and added two new directors, Joakim Nideborn as vice chairman and Helena Svancar.
Then, on June 1, 2026, short seller Ningi Research published a report arguing that Sivers' rally, which took the stock from under a dollar to double digits over the prior year, was built on speculative hyperscaler talk and accounting it called improper. Ningi's core claim is that roughly SEK 97 million, about 31%, of Sivers' 2025 revenue is dubious, because the company allegedly recognized revenue on products it had not yet shipped and booked government research grants as ordinary commercial sales. Sivers' OTC-listed shares fell 9.2% the day the report came out, and the company had not published a detailed public rebuttal as of this writing.
That report led two US law firms, Rosen Law Firm and Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, to open preliminary investigations into potential securities claims on behalf of Sivers shareholders. Those are law firm solicitations looking for plaintiffs, not lawsuits that have actually been filed, but they are a real signal of legal risk hanging over the stock.
Sivers' own numbers give some of Ningi's argument room to breathe. Revenue fell 22% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, to SEK 61.9 million, with a net loss of about SEK 43 million. When Sivers published its full-year 2025 annual report in May, its auditors flagged going-concern doubts, meaning they were not confident the company could keep operating without more capital. Management's counterargument is that a chunk of expected revenue got pushed from late 2025 into the second half of 2026 because of a US government shutdown and delayed defense budget approvals, and that its sales pipeline is real and growing, up 77% since the start of the year to $799 million by the company's own count.
The CPO deals: real partnerships, no revenue yet
Underneath all of that noise, Sivers has actually done something concrete in co-packaged optics. On March 17, 2026, it announced a three-way partnership with O-Net Technologies and Enablence Technologies to build an external light source module for CPO systems in AI data centers. Sivers supplies the laser arrays, Enablence contributes a coupler component, and O-Net handles manufacturing and integration. The three companies are targeting prototypes in the first half of 2026 and production readiness by year end.
Then, on June 2, 2026, Sivers announced a bigger partner: GlobalFoundries, the contract chipmaker. Sivers' laser array technology is set to integrate into GlobalFoundries' SCALE platform, short for Silicon Photonics Co-packaged Advanced Light Engine, which GlobalFoundries is positioning for CPO, linear pluggable optics, and other AI data center interconnects. GlobalFoundries frames the pluggable optics market it is chasing at $25 billion by 2030.
Neither deal comes with a disclosed dollar figure, a shipment commitment, or a revenue timeline. They are technology-integration agreements, meaning Sivers' chips are getting designed into other companies' platforms, not purchase orders. Sivers did land one confirmed order in the period, an $8.2 million contract from ALL.SPACE for satellite-communications chips, but that is a separate business line, Ka-band beamforming RF chips, and has nothing to do with CPO.
How Sivers stacks up against AAOI, Lumentum and Coherent
The difference between Sivers and the three companies it gets compared to is roughly the difference between a supplier trying to get invited to the table and companies already eating at it.
| Company | Price (7/15/26) | Market cap | Latest quarterly revenue | YoY growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) | $4.39 | ~$1.3B | SEK 61.9M (Q1 2026) | -22% |
| Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) | $122.80 | $9.85B | $151.1M (Q1 2026) | +51% |
| Lumentum (LITE) | $809.51 | $63.0B | $665.5M (FQ2 2026) | +66% |
| Coherent (COHR) | $312.12 | $61.1B | $1.81B (FQ3 2026) | +21% |
Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) is the volume story. The stock is up more than 400% in 2026 on the back of first volume shipments of 800G AI-datacenter transceivers, with first-quarter revenue up 51% year over year to $151.1 million and datacenter revenue up 154% to $81.4 million. Management has guided to more than $1.1 billion in revenue for the full year.
Lumentum (LITE) is the backlog story. Fiscal second-quarter revenue hit $665.5 million, up 66% year over year, and the company is sitting on an optical circuit switch backlog worth more than $400 million. CEO Michael Hurlston has confirmed, on back-to-back earnings calls, an incremental multi-hundred-million-dollar CPO order for ultra-high-power lasers deliverable in the first half of calendar 2027.
Coherent (COHR) is the scale story. Its fiscal third-quarter revenue came in at $1.81 billion, up 21% year over year, with its Datacenter & Communications segment alone doing $1.36 billion, about three-quarters of total revenue and growing around 36% year over year. In March 2026, Nvidia agreed to invest $2 billion directly into Coherent alongside a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment, in exchange for future capacity on Coherent's laser and optical networking lines. At OFC 2026, Coherent demonstrated multiple CPO platforms, including a 6.4-terabit design pairing silicon photonics with its own laser source, while it ships 1.6-terabit pluggable transceivers today.
Put another way: Nvidia's single equity check into Coherent, $2 billion, is bigger than Sivers' entire market cap. Coherent's optics-and-communications segment alone likely booked more revenue in one quarter than Sivers has in its history as a company. That's the real gap between a story stock and an established supplier. Photonics itself is still a legitimate, fast-growing niche, and a laser maker this small can land inside a much bigger platform's supply chain without ever becoming a $60 billion company. Sivers just hasn't gotten paid for that spot yet. AAOI, Lumentum and Coherent have.
Who bought, who sold
The insider activity only makes sense against that backdrop. Insiders were mostly selling before July 9:
- Harish Krishnaswamy, managing director of the Sivers Wireless subsidiary, sold down through late March, then exited his remaining 1.39 million shares in May. Combined: roughly SEK 108 million.
- Vice chairman Tomas Duffy sold about SEK 4.5 million worth over two days in late March. He resigned from the board weeks later.
- Director Todd Thomson sold roughly SEK 7.9 million worth that same week.
Then, on July 9, 2026, it reversed. A compensation program the AGM had approved in June gave each director SEK 1 million, split between a share purchase and the resulting tax bill, with a 12-month lock-up. Six insiders bought that day:
- CEO Vickram Vathulya: 24,000 shares, about SEK 950,000
- Todd Thomson: 12,500 shares at SEK 42.80, about SEK 535,000
- Karin Raj: 13,264 shares at SEK 34.68, about SEK 460,000
- Helena Svancar: 11,019 shares at SEK 41.74, about SEK 460,000
- Joakim Nideborn and chairman Bami Bastani: roughly SEK 500,000 each. Exact share counts for those two weren't broken out in the disclosures we found.
Applied Optoelectronics moved the opposite way in the same window. SVP Fred Chang sold 40,329 shares on June 17 under a pre-set trading plan, worth about $6.9 million. CFO Stefan Murry sold 33,000 shares on June 12 in the open market, worth about $5.5 million. We found no comparable insider activity at Lumentum or Coherent.
What it means
Insider buying is normally read as confidence, and six people buying the same day is about as strong a version of that signal as exists. This batch came with strings attached, though. The money was company-provided, tied to a program the board designed back in June, not personal savings an executive chose to risk. And it landed exactly when Sivers needed a headline that wasn't about lawsuits or leaks. Still, a 12-month lock-up is a real bet on the stock, made by six people who could have sat this out. Just don't mistake it for the same signal it would send at a company that wasn't under investigation.
The CPO partnerships don't depend on any of this playing out one way or another. Getting designed into GlobalFoundries' platform is real technical validation, leak probe or not. What's still unresolved is whether that validation turns into actual revenue, and whether Sivers is still around, independently, to collect it.
Here's my actual read: if the underlying technology is as good as these partnerships suggest, Sivers could end up being one of the smaller names that mattered in how AI data centers actually get built. GlobalFoundries does not put its own platform's name behind just anyone. That's a real possibility, not a promise, and it's a completely separate bet from whether this particular stock survives its own legal mess with the share price intact. I would not confuse the two.
Related coverage
- AAOI and the AI optics story
- SemiAnalysis says Nvidia's Kyber AI rack is delayed to 2028
- Should you actually copy stocks bought by hedge funds, Congress, or insiders?
Sources
- Sivers Semiconductors, Sivers & GlobalFoundries Advance AI Data Center Optical Solutions
- Sivers Semiconductors, Sivers, O-Net and Enablence Announce External Light Sources for AI Datacenters
- Ningi Research, Sivers Semiconductors: Dubious Revenue Accounting
- Rosen Law Firm via BusinessWire, Securities Class Action Investigation Notice
- Sivers Semiconductors, Bulletin from the June 2026 Annual General Meeting
- Sivers Semiconductors, Board Completes Purchase of Shares as Approved at the June 2026 AGM
- Coherent Corp, Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results
- Nvidia, NVIDIA and Coherent Announce Strategic Partnership
- Applied Optoelectronics, Form 4 Insider Trading Activity
Cover photo: OUSENT / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
This is general market commentary and opinion, not investment advice. Markets can go down as well as up, and you can lose money. Always do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision.
