Gary Smith 自 2001 年 5 月起担任 Ciena 首席执行官，并带领公司度过了光纤繁荣之后的电信业崩盘。他告诉《华尔街日报》的 Steven Rosenbush，今天的 AI 建设热潮是另一种截然不同的周期。
Gary Smith has been Ciena CEO since May 2001, and led the company through the telecom crash that followed the fibre boom. He says today’s AI build-out is a different kind of cycle, the optical networking company’s chief executive told Steven Rosenbush of The Wall Street Journal.
“经历过那场痛苦，我对这一切理应保持足够的警惕，对吧？正如你所料，”Smith 对《华尔街日报》表示。
“Having lived through the pain of that, I’m suitably paranoid around all of this, right? As you’d expect,” Smith told the Journal.
他说，两次繁荣的差异大于相似之处。AI 时代会产生失败的押注，但应按其自身条件来评判。
He said the differences between the two booms outweigh the similarities. The AI era will produce losing bets, he said, but it should be judged on its own terms.
从 400 亿美元峰值跌去 90% Ciena 于 20 世纪 90 年代末上市，首次公开募股（IPO）估值为 34 亿美元，据《华尔街日报》报道。其市值后来一度超过 400 亿美元，随后在崩盘中跌去 90% 以上。目前市值约为 457.5 亿美元。
From a $40bn peak to a 90% fall Ciena went public in the late 1990s in an IPO that valued it at $3.4bn, according to the Journal. Its market value later passed $40bn, then fell by more than 90% in the bust. It is now worth about $45.75bn.
现年 66 岁的 Smith 将 AI 需求描述为一系列浪潮。第一波是数据中心互联，仍在加速攀升。推理阶段——企业将训练好的模型投入使用——才刚刚起步。随后是 AI 智能体，然后是机器人技术，他说。“人们严重低估了所需基础设施的规模，”Smith 说。
Smith, 66, described AI demand as a series of waves. The first, linking data centres to each other, is still ramping up. Inference, where businesses put trained models to work, is just starting. AI agents come next, and then robotics, he said. “People have grossly underestimated the amount of infrastructure that’s going to be required,” Smith said.
Ciena 已制造出 3 纳米版本的 WaveLogic 芯片，可在单根光纤上实现 1.6 太比特/秒的传输速率。2 纳米版本正在研发中。“无闲置 GPU”花旗的 Heath Terry 早前在接受《华尔街日报》采访时表示，电信繁荣时期铺设的光纤约有 94% 闲置未用。“并不存在闲置的 GPU，”Terry 说。
Ciena has built 3-nanometre versions of its WaveLogic chips that send 1.6 terabits per second over a single strand of fibre. A 2-nanometre version is in development. “No dark GPUs”About 94% of the fibre laid in the telecom boom went unused, Citi’s Heath Terry told the Journal in an earlier interview. “There are no dark GPUs,” Terry said.
Smith 指出了另一个不同之处。他说，今天的买家包括利润丰厚的云计算巨头。“如今，我们无法跟上需求，”Smith 说。
Smith pointed to another difference. Today’s buyers include highly profitable cloud giants, he said. “Today, we haven’t been able to keep up with demand,” Smith said.
据《华尔街日报》报道，Ciena 预计 2026 至 2029 财年复合年增长率将达 30%。预计到 2026 财年末，订单积压将达约 100 亿美元。
Ciena expects compound annual growth of 30% from fiscal 2026 to 2029, according to the Journal. It expects to end fiscal 2026 with an order backlog of about $10bn.
其他近期关于AI支出的观点存在分歧。阿波罗全球管理公司的托尔斯滕·斯洛克周一表示，美国非科技类公司现在将AI支出视为一项成本。高德纳咨询公司已警告AI基础设施可能出现减记。英伟达已向新云服务商投入1700亿美元。
Other recent views on AI spending differ. Apollo’s Torsten Slok said on Monday that US companies outside tech now treat AI spending as a cost. Gartner has warned of AI infrastructure write-downs. Nvidia has put $170bn behind neoclouds.