POET and INFQ: Two Speculative Bets on AI's Plumbing — Photonics and Quantum

This is the riskiest pair I've written about so far.

POET Technologies is a Canadian optical-interposer company whose stock ran from $6.97 on May 1 to a high above $20 on May 14, then slid back to $12.21 by May 30 — a triple, then a 40% drawdown, in twenty-nine trading days. Infleqtion (INFQ) is a neutral-atom quantum computing company that went public via SPAC in February 2026 and just signed a $100M CHIPS Act letter of intent on May 21.

Neither has the financials to justify a confident long position. Both could 5x by 2028. Both could lose 70% just as easily.

I'm putting $25 a week into each, $50 total — half what I commit to less speculative names like Netflix and Nike. This post is me being honest about why I'm doing something that could very easily look stupid in eighteen months.

POET is a $12 stock that was $20 two weeks ago

The May volatility tells you most of what you need to know.

POET trades around $12.21 as of May 30, down from a $20+ peak on May 14. The drop is the market digesting two related shocks. First, POET raised $400 million in a direct offering of 19 million new shares plus matching warrants at $21 / $26.15 — necessary cash, but persistent dilution is the structural problem with pre-revenue science companies and shareholders priced it in immediately. Second, federal securities class action lawsuits are organizing — alleging the company misrepresented its U.S. tax status as a likely Passive Foreign Investment Company (PFIC) and that an executive breached confidentiality with Marvell's Celestial AI unit.

The pitch underneath the noise is still real, though. POET's Optical Interposer integrates photonic and electronic devices on a single chip — the kind of plumbing AI data centers need as chip-to-chip bandwidth becomes the bottleneck. Q1 2026 produced $503K of NRE and product revenue, up from $167K a year earlier — 200% YoY growth, beating estimates, but still microscopic relative to the $3B+ market cap the stock currently carries. The company also announced a $50M purchase order from Lumilens, deeper LITEON collaboration (1.6T optical modules for hyperscale AI, samples Q2 2026), and a Lessengers partnership. The Malaysia manufacturing ramp is underway.

The bear case is the math.

POET burned $43M in Q4 2025 alone. The $400M raise extends runway but doesn't change unit economics — there are no profitable units. Shares outstanding are now 152.9 million and price-to-sales sits above 2,200 on a TTM basis. For context: Nvidia trades around 25× sales, considered expensive. POET trades at roughly 90× that.

If POET works, it's the photonic plumbing of the AI buildout — a 5-10× return by decade-end. If it doesn't, it's another cautionary tale about pre-revenue companies trading at thousand-times-sales multiples.

INFQ just got more interesting than I originally thought

When I first started writing about INFQ I expected it to be the more speculative of the two. It's not — and the May numbers are the reason.

Infleqtion reported Q1 2026 revenue of $9.5 million, up 14% year over year, and raised full-year 2026 revenue guidance to at least $40 million — meaningful real revenue from a quantum company that didn't exist as a public entity twelve weeks ago. On May 21, the company signed a $100M letter of intent under the CHIPS and Science Act — part of a $2 billion package the Commerce Department awarded to nine quantum companies, including Rigetti and D-Wave. INFQ also disclosed a NASA JPL collaboration on the Quantum Gravity Gradiometer Pathfinder mission, backed by $20 million in contracts to date.

The technology bet is what makes INFQ structurally different.

Three other quantum stocks are publicly traded — IonQ (trapped-ion), Rigetti (superconducting), D-Wave (annealing). Each one is betting on a different physical approach to scaling qubits, and only one or two of those approaches will end up actually mattering. Infleqtion uses neutral atoms held in optical lattices — a fourth approach, considered by many researchers as the most promising path to fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale.

There's also a real-revenue side most quantum pure-plays don't have. Infleqtion sells quantum sensors today — quantum clocks, quantum RF sensors, quantum inertial sensors for GPS-denied environments — into defense and aerospace customers. The $9.5M Q1 revenue is meaningfully larger than IonQ's quarterly product revenue when it went public, and it's growing.

The stock closed around $13.97 on May 14 — meaningfully up from the post-SPAC trough but still well below the $1.8B pre-money equity valuation if you do the math on the share count.

The bear case is real, though. It's a SPAC, and over 60% of post-2020 SPAC mergers trade well below merger price two years later. Twelve weeks of public-market history isn't enough to know if the cost structure scales, whether grant revenue masks soft enterprise demand, or whether neutral-atom is actually the winning approach. Insider and SPAC sponsor lockups expire over the next 6-12 months — that almost always brings sell pressure. And quantum hardware is one of the most expensive things to build. INFQ will need to raise more capital. The dilution timer is already ticking.

Why $25 each, why both — and why it might be wrong

This is the most speculative position I take seriously. I don't put real money on penny stocks or short-dated options. But these aren't pennies — POET is around $3B market cap, INFQ around $3.5B — they're small-caps with science-project economics. The difference matters.

Equal-weighting them isn't a thesis. It's an admission that I have no idea which one — if either — is going to work. Photonics could become the AI plumbing of the next decade and POET could be irrelevant because Marvell or Broadcom acquires the actual winner. Quantum could finally get useful by 2030 and INFQ could be a footnote because superconducting qubits win. Or both could land and 5x. Or neither.

$25 a week — $1,300 a year per stock — is the amount I can lose entirely without it changing anything material about my financial situation. If I'm wrong about both, I'm out $2,600 over a year. That's the price of being in the conversation when these stories play out.

Here's what $25/week into POET would have looked like across the actual May 2026 volatility:

After four weeks: 7.78 shares at an average cost of $12.85 — meaningfully below the $20 peak and only slightly above the current price. The lump-sum equivalent at any point in May would have been worse. Same principle on INFQ, where post-SPAC volatility regularly moves the stock 10-15% in a week on news. Volatility you can't predict becomes cost-basis you can control.

What would change my mind

For POET: the LITEON 1.6T samples slip past Q2 2026, the Lumilens $50M order stalls, OR the PFIC tax / confidentiality class actions produce evidence of material misstatements that survive a motion to dismiss. Any one of these and I cut the position by half. All three and I exit entirely.

For INFQ: the CHIPS LOI fails to convert to a definitive award by year-end, OR Q3 2026 revenue comes in below the $9-10M run-rate needed to support the raised $40M guidance, OR a Google/IBM superconducting-qubit milestone makes the neutral-atom approach look obsolete.

If none of those happen, I keep buying. If they do, I stop and reassess fast.

Why this kind of post matters

I'm writing this one specifically because most investing content about names like POET and INFQ is either pump-and-dump cheerleading or condescending dismissal. Both miss the point.

These are real technology bets. They have real risks. The risks are large enough that you should size positions accordingly and assume any individual name might go to zero. They also have real upside, because there are only so many publicly traded ways to invest in the next decade's most important compute technologies — photonics for AI data centers, quantum for advantaged simulation and sensing. Two markets that, if they materialize, are worth trillions.

Speculative positions belong in a portfolio — they just shouldn't be the portfolio. $50 a week between two of them, out of whatever you can afford to allocate to investing total, sits in the right neighborhood of risk-to-reward for me. Yours might be different. The point is to size deliberately and admit it's speculation.

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This is not financial advice. I own both POET and INFQ. I'm sharing my personal research and strategy. Penny stocks and small-cap science projects can and do go to zero. Always do your own due diligence before investing.