Ciena makes networking equipment and software that telecom carriers, cable companies and large enterprises use to build the optical networks that carry internet traffic across long distances and between data centers. Its equipment sits at the core of how internet traffic actually moves through fiber optic cables, converting data into light signals and managing how that traffic is routed across a network. Growing internet traffic, driven by video streaming, cloud computing and now AI workloads moving data between data centers, has been a long-term tailwind for demand for the kind of high-capacity optical networking equipment Ciena builds. The company sells primarily to a customer base of telecom carriers and large cloud and internet companies, making its revenue sensitive to how much these customers are spending on network capacity expansion in a given year.