Ciena pulled in $1.67 billion worth of revenue for the third quarter (Q3) of its fiscal 2026, marking a 37% year-over-year (YoY) increase.

The quarter saw optical networking generate $1.19 billion in revenues, accounting for just over 71% of company revenues.

Hyperscaler-linked revenues continued to accelerate, accounting for more than half of total revenue (53%) for the quarter. Ciena pointed to hyperscale expansion across India, the Middle East, and certain parts of Asia, with neoclouds, or "neoscalers" as Ciena dubs them, also making increased investments in networking.

Service provider customers made up 37% of total revenue, with telecom making up for what Ciena CEO Gary Smith called their “under-investment in optical infrastructure in the last five years.”

Revenue from Ciena’s Reconfigurable Line System (RLS) and Waveserver platforms each grew by more than 55% YoY, while revenue from coherent pluggable optics, including shipments of WaveLogic 6 Nano 800ZR modules, more than doubled per category and that particular product line.

Ciena also reported record shipments across its WaveLogic 5 Extreme, WaveLogic 6 Extreme, and WaveLogic 6 Nano wares, as put down to demand for AI compute and the “massive scale” build out of scale-across networking.

“AI is starting to build on the previous eras of communications, including those driven first by the internet and then by the cloud. It is doing so at a massive scale. As a result, AI is currently driving and will continue to drive significant increases in both bandwidth connectivity demand and network traffic growth,” Smith explained.

Ciena supply optimism

Smith during the earnings call described an “unprecedented durable demand environment” with a $10 billion backlog edging into 2028.

Ciena CFO Marc Graff claimed the firm had taken decisive steps to both strengthen its supply security and increase output, commenting: “In recent weeks, we finalized long-term agreements that secure supply of certain key components through 2029, including incremental capacity for those key components that will enable us to support growing customer demand. This extends the investments we have made for this year to drive 35% revenue growth.”

Graff did add that price increases have been unavoidable, and that depending on the customer and the product line, customers are seeing “anywhere between high single-digits types of price increases to something in the range of high teens, low 20s type of price increases.”

Ciena also sees potential in optical circuit switching (OCS) to increase the optical content inside AI-centric data centres, but Graff declined to comment on whether Ciena would be moving into the OCS market anytime soon.