Ciena posted record revenue of $1.43 billion in its fiscal first quarter, up 33% year over year, but the optical networking giant was blunt in that the number would have been higher if it could actually get enough components to build what customers are demanding.

On an earnings call with investors, CFO Mark Graff said the company was seeing a “meaningfully higher backlog” that’s swollen by $2 billion in a single quarter to $7 billion, with nearly all new orders now queued for 2027 delivery.

“Our order intake has been incredibly strong over the past 90 days, leading to a new record by a significant margin,” Graff told investors, with Ciena expecting its backlog to continue to grow throughout the year.

The constraint is rooted not in manufacturing but components. Ciena is working to expand its own production capacity, with capital expenditure notably hitting $74 million in the quarter, roughly two- to three -imes its historical quarterly average, Graff said.

The deeper bottleneck sits with component suppliers, with Graff confirming the company was negotiating long-term purchase commitments to secure supply. He was, however, candid that demand will continue to outstrip supply “at least for the next several quarters.”

“We are deeply engaged with component vendors, which is where more of the industry challenges exist, to secure and expand supply, including through responsible long-term purchase commitments,” the CFO added.

Despite supply chain headaches, Ciena’s financial performance was hard to argue with. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.35, more than double the same period a year ago, while adjusted gross margin reached 44.7%, ahead of internal expectations.

As a result, Ciena raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $5.9 billion and $6.3 billion, with CEO Gary Smith calling its early 2026 outing “unprecedented.”

“Opportunity continues to build in waves, from our traditional and expanding WAN business to multiple applications in and around the data center,” Smith told investors. “Furthermore, to monetize AI for both training and inference workloads, the latter of which represents another significant growth vector still in its infancy, the foundational requirement is again high-speed connectivity.”

The networking giant is also benefiting from increased interest from customers in the neocloud, or to use Ciena’s own parlance, "neoscalers."

Smith told investors Ciena was seeing “an emerging ramp” around such providers, contending the network is “a real priority for them.”

“I think that plays through to the hyperscalers, too,” the CEO said. “There has been such a maniacal focus and continues to be, obviously, on things like power, GPU accessibility, etc. Now it is really about the network.

“The traffic is beginning to come out of the network both for inference and for training, and the neoscalers are obviously seeing that too," Smith added. "So they are leaning in on the network. Now we are also beginning to see some of them wish to have control of some of that network as well and do their own builds.”

Smith said the company was “cautious," given the financial structure of “some” such neocloud players with regard to doing their own network builds, though added: “But we are seeing, across the board, the neoscalers leaning in on their whole network requirements currently going for MOFN (managed optical fiber network).”