Gianmarco Conti

And no surprise, AI was the center of most conversations, with the overall tone for management teams remaining positive, both around how AI is impacting their top lines as well as their bottom line.

To help us unpack some of the key themes discussed at the conference, with me today is Brad Zelnick, Melissa Withers, Gianmarco Conti, and Nate Svenson.

We have a lot to discuss today, so let's dive right in.

Brad, let's start with you.

A little bit more on Apple.

DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria added, entering the John Ternus era today, we will be rightfully focused on new hardware as the key to the next five years.

But Apple's position in AI has been quietly improving as well.

We believe the key to Apple's ability to get off to a good start in the John Ternus era will be the foldable iPhone Ultra, as well as the impact of price increases across a broad set of products and services.

Deutsche Bank says the first phase of the AI build-out was all about compute, NVIDIA GPUs, and the data centers housing them.

The next phase could be connectivity, as those massive AI clusters need increasingly sophisticated optical networks to move data between chips.

An analyst at Deutsche, Gianmarco Conti, calls Lumentum and Coherent his highest conviction hardware picks, saying both are supply-constrained, sold-out, and raising prices as demand surges.

Convidia has also invested $2 billion in each company, helping secure future hardware supplies.