Elon Musk wrote on X on 14 November that many of Nvidia’s supply deals “were a handshake with Jensen, not a written contract”, and that “at least some of those critical deals will be lost”. Our first piece on Musk’s post set it against the commitments in Nvidia’s own 10-Q. This one reads the other side: what Nvidia’s suppliers disclose.
We scanned the latest SEC filings of 29 component and systems suppliers. Only one, Fabrinet, names Nvidia as a customer above 10% of revenue: 16.3% in its fiscal 2026. Three others, Coherent, Lumentum and Marvell, disclose written agreements with Nvidia that came with $2 billion of Nvidia investment each, or $6 billion together, by our count.
Business Pill · Concentration explained
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on customer and supplier concentration. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss these companies or this story.
The key insight: As we read the filings, the supplier side shows less dependence on Nvidia by name than the handshake debate suggests: of 29 filings we scanned, only Fabrinet names Nvidia as a 10% customer, and its Nvidia share fell from 35.1% to 16.3% in two fiscal years.
Fabrinet, the optical and electronics manufacturer, says in its fiscal 2026 annual report that Cisco, Nvidia, Nokia and Amazon “contributed 19.9%, 16.3%, 10.7% and 10.5%, respectively, of our revenues”. Its table shows Nvidia at 27.6% in fiscal 2025 and 35.1% in fiscal 2024.
On Fabrinet’s reported revenue of $4,641.1 million, $3,419.3 million and $2,883.0 million, that is about $756.5 million of Nvidia revenue in fiscal 2026, against about $1,011.9 million two years earlier: a fall of about 25% while Fabrinet’s total revenue rose about 61%, by our arithmetic. Our October piece on Fabrinet’s customers covered the same disclosure.
In its latest quarterly report, for the three months to 25 September 2026, Fabrinet says three customers each contributed 10% or more of revenue, together 46.7%, without naming them.
Nvidia’s share of Fabrinet revenue by fiscal year, from Fabrinet’s fiscal 2026 Form 10-K; dollar values are our arithmetic on Fabrinet’s reported revenue. Fabrinet is the only one of 29 supplier filings we scanned that names Nvidia as a 10% customer.
Three Written Deals Worth $6 Billion
Coherent’s annual report says that on 2 March 2026 it “entered into a multi-year strategic agreement with NVIDIA”, and that the “non-exclusive agreement includes a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment with NVIDIA, as well as future access and capacity rights for advanced laser and optical networking products”. Its quarterly report says Nvidia bought 7,788,161 shares at $256.80 each, for $2 billion.
Lumentum’s annual report says it sold about 2.9 million shares of convertible preferred stock to Nvidia on 2 March 2026 at $695.31 a share, for $2.0 billion in cash. Marvell’s quarterly report says it issued Series A convertible preferred stock to Nvidia on 31 March 2026 for $2.0 billion, and that the two companies announced a strategic partnership. Our piece on Marvell’s planned Lumentum purchase covers that deal.
Big Customers Without Names
Most suppliers do not name their largest buyers. Five of the 29 report a single unnamed customer at 25% or more of revenue: Astera Labs at 53% in the quarter to 30 September, Aehr Test Systems at 47.5%, Credo at 43% in the quarter to 1 August, Lumentum at 26.6% in fiscal 2026 and Arista at 26%, by our count.
The filings do not say who those customers are. Astera Labs notes that “Certain of the customers listed above are manufacturing partners that purchase the Company’s products on behalf of the Company’s end customers”, so a direct customer may not be the company that designs the system.
What the Filings Say About Contracts
Lumentum’s risk factors speak to the question Musk raised, for its customers in general. It says “the majority of our customers do not have contractual purchase commitments”, and that “Many of our customers purchase products under purchase orders or under contracts that do not contain volume or long-term purchase commitments”.
The Structural Read
As we read them, the three disclosed Nvidia agreements are written and dated: Coherent, Lumentum and Marvell each describe a 2026 agreement or share sale that brought $2 billion of Nvidia investment, $6 billion together by our count.
As we read the unnamed-customer tables, they leave the open question open: five suppliers report one buyer at 25% or more of revenue, and the filings do not say who it is or what terms apply.
Lumentum fiscal 2026 Form 10-K
“We rely on a limited number of customers for a significant portion of our sales; and the majority of our customers do not have contractual purchase commitments.”
Three Implications
FOR INVESTORS IN AI COMPONENT MAKERS Fabrinet names Nvidia at 16.3% of fiscal 2026 revenue; Astera Labs, Aehr, Credo, Lumentum and Arista report one unnamed customer at 25% or more.
FOR NVIDIA Coherent says its non-exclusive agreement includes a multi-billion-dollar purchase commitment and capacity rights; Lumentum and Marvell report $2.0 billion preferred sales to Nvidia.
FOR READERS OF THE HANDSHAKE CLAIM Lumentum says the majority of its customers do not have contractual purchase commitments; the filings do not say which arrangements with Nvidia are written.
The framework says: “The AI race has a new bottleneck, and it’s not what most observers expect.”
As we read it, the supplier filings point to the same kind of question at the component level; the framework does not discuss these suppliers or Musk’s post.
What Is Not Established
The filings show customer shares and the agreements companies chose to disclose; they do not show whether any other supply arrangement with Nvidia is written or informal. The description of the deals as handshakes is Musk’s, and the claim in the clip he quoted, that Google is asking suppliers for capacity, is Dylan Patel’s; neither was independently verified.
The scan covers 29 US-listed filers and leaves out private and Asian suppliers that do not file with the SEC. None of the companies named was contacted for this piece.
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Across 29 supplier filings, only Fabrinet names Nvidia as a 10% customer, at 16.3% of fiscal 2026 revenue. Coherent, Lumentum and Marvell disclose written agreements that came with $6 billion of Nvidia investment, by our count. The filings cannot show how many other arrangements rest on terms Musk described as a handshake.
A note on sourcing. Customer shares, agreements and share sales come from the companies’ own SEC filings (Forms 10-K and 10-Q), read on EDGAR on 14 November 2026; the Musk quote comes from his post on X the same day. The 29-filing scan, counts, totals and dollar conversions are our arithmetic. None of the companies named was contacted for this piece.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
