AI Is Supplying Blowout Earnings Again

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss:

• Cisco’s blowout earnings.
• What to do when a cyclical company has a new catalyst.
• Lumentem’s even more impressive earnings.
• Can a company with such a high valuation be worth it?
• Mailbag: What are some non-AI stock ideas for portfolio diversification?

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on May 14, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: We're talking earnings and investor questions on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime contributors, Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. Today, we're getting lots of questions from members, and we thought this would be a really good time to combine some listener questions as well as earnings reports that we've seen coming out in the past couple of days, as a little bit of a marriage of good ideas. We're going to talk about Cisco's earnings. We're going to talk about Lumentum's earnings, and also we'll get into, hey, maybe we should talk about non-AI things for a little bit from our investor mailbag.

But as I said, we're going to start with Cisco. We got a question a little while ago from one of our listeners. I hope I get the name right, Halish Shankar, and was asking about Cisco and what are our thoughts on it. I thought it would be a great time to start the conversation today because Cisco reported earnings, and the stock is up 13.8% as we were recording because numbers were pretty good. Revenue growth was up about 12% for the year earnings was up, and obviously guidance was looking pretty good. Jon, why don't you run us through the numbers and what you guys saw in this particular earnings that I would say defied expectations of what Cisco has been for a while.

Jon Quast: It's so surprising to be talking about Cisco, one of the poster children of the dot-com bubble over 20 years ago, but really, the business is booming unlike ever before. You look at the most recent quarter, 12% top-line growth. Really, all of the growth is coming from one part of the business. Cisco has various components, but there's one part of the business that's driving everything, and that is networking. The company reported 25% year-over-year growth in the networking side of the business. Everything else is either down or basically flat.

Essentially what is happening here? As the AI infrastructure build-out marches on, all of these GPUs, the clusters, even the data centers themselves need to be connected, and this really plays to Cisco's strengths. It's getting a ton of demand, in particular, from the hyperscaler businesses. You think of the public cloud giants, the tech giants, the Magnificent Seven, these are the companies that are needing network solutions, such as the ones that Cisco provides. What is fascinating here, when you look at the orders to the hyperscalers last fiscal year, about two billion total for Cisco. Going into this fiscal year, it was expecting five billion total, and that was quite ambitious of a projection, more than doubling year over year. But we're three quarters into its fiscal year now, we're already surpassed that projection, and now management is saying, we're expecting nine billion of orders in this fiscal year from the hyperscalers. Incredible year-over-year growth there.

It's not just hyperscalers, it's also the neo-Cloud businesses. We just got report from Nebius today signed a $27 billion deal with Meta. Its business is growing like crazy. It needs networking solutions as well, but all in all, good quarter for Cisco.

Matt Frankel: Yeah, I wanted to lean into something Jon just mentioned and emphasize the word orders. Product orders to hyperscalers are growing at a triple-digit rate. AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers were $1.9 billion in the third fiscal quarter. That's up from 600 million a year ago, so more than tripling. Overall, Cisco's orders were up by 35%. Jon mentioned the top line only grew by 12% in the quarter, but overall product orders, which are very indicative of future revenue, were up 35%. Even excluding hyperscalers were up 19%, we're seeing really strong demand across the business. Networking orders were up 50% year over year, as Jon mentioned, that was the strongest segment, and hyperscalers are the real story here.

Just to put this in perspective, Jon correctly mentioned that now Cisco expects $9 billion in orders this fiscal year for AI infrastructure. That's compared to just $4 billion in expected recognized AI revenue. More than double what they're recognizing in AI infrastructure revenue, they're expecting for future revenue because they're getting these orders in. This is really just a long way to say that the reaction to Cisco's quarter isn't necessarily about revenue. No one's that excited about 12% year over year top line growth or the earnings that they just reported on a per-share basis. It's as much about the orders it now has on its books that will be recognized in the future periods, and the anticipated acceleration in that number over time.

Tyler Crowe: Getting back to the question that our listener Halish asked related to, it's like, is this a good idea? This is one of the things I've been struggling with Cisco, and we'll get into it when we talk about Lumentum in the next section, as well, is that these are businesses that have been notoriously cyclical for pretty much all of their life as publicly traded companies. Cisco, like to Jon's point, was the poster child of massive build-out during the dot-com boom. If everybody had to have Cisco systems equipment, and then everyone was like, maybe we don't. Maybe we can use other stuff, and it was OK. It took decades for investors to see the highs of Cisco stock again. Looking back over the past 10 years, revenue has been up and down. Operating cash flow for this company is more or less what it was 10 years ago, and so this is where it's been a little bit of a struggle for me. The company is doing much better right now, but is this just a short-term catalyst of a typically cyclical business? Or is this something that's fundamentally different about the business, and we as investors should look at it differently?

Matt Frankel: Yeah, Cisco is at an all-time high after this earnings report. It's nearly doubled over the past year. The AI business has nearly doubled their expectations, as well. I would argue that not only is it a move that's justified, but this is a fundamentally different time. This isn't just cyclicality right now. I don't think we've seen an AI cycle over the past couple of decades. This is something that's new. It's something that wasn't really a big market opportunity. No one was talking about AI infrastructure a few years ago. Shares trade for about 26 times forward earnings right now. There's a solid case to be made that revenue growth will accelerate in the 2027 fiscal year, which starts very soon. I'd actually be comfortable opening a small position in Cisco at this level, even at an all-time high, and then adding incrementally. That's just my take on it.

Jon Quast: For me, Cisco just bores me. I'm sorry to all the Cisco shareholders out there. I just want to be honest about that up front. I wanted to just move on from this. However, given the question, I really took a honest, hard look at it, and I think I need to agree with Matt here that there may be a case for owning Cisco stock here at this price. Listen, it's still quite the value compared to some of its competitors in the space. Growth is accelerating. We look at the next quarter's projections, projecting 19% growth up from what was it 12-13 this quarter. That's an acceleration, that's a good thing. Operating margin recently went from 23%-25%. That's a good thing. You look at what Cisco's products it provides, it does seem like they are starting to take some market share here and if that continues, I don't think this is a terrible stock today.

Now, I think that I would still prefer Arista Networks, that's ANET, for its debt-free balance sheet. I like nice clean balance sheets, especially in the face of uncertainty. Cisco's isn't as clean as that, but I don't think it's crazy to own Cisco stock here. Hearing both your response and thinking about it myself, I've always looked at it in the same sense of these are all how bullish are you on AI build-out? You can look at the rates of spending and all the studies that are going out related to this. If you are a wholesale believer in what is being published and what is being projected for AI spending, then absolutely, these are 4-, 5-, 6-year catalysts that are going to be hard to avoid as investors; it all comes down to how much you believe it. We've discussed it many times a year before, and I feel bad like a broken record saying it all over again. But it really does come down to how much of a believer in this AI infrastructure build-out you are. Coming up next, we're going to even talk more about this with earnings related to Lumentum.

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Jon Quast: Similar to the stock move that we saw with Cisco earlier today, shares of Lumentum were up as high as 21% on recent earnings reports. This is a company that we got a question about from one of our listeners, Nathan Holtstein. It's also a prominent member of several scorecards on the Hidden Gem side of various Motley Fool Investing Services. It's been recommended a couple of times by CEO Tom Gardner and some of the other in some of our recommendations services. It is something that's probably on a lot of investors' minds today. We want to get into earnings and try to get to Nathan's question as much as possible. But this isn't probably one people have heard about a lot. It's really one of those behind-the-scenes businesses. Matt, before you dig into what was actually in the report, give us the too long, didn't read of the 10-K for Lumentum as what it actually does.

Matt Frankel: Yeah, Lumentum has been around for a long time. It produces optical components for things like 3D mapping for high-speed communications, think fiber optics. For the longest time, this was a company that got most of its business from the rollout of 5G technology and telecommunications and things like that. But the key thing to know now is that the components Lumentum makes are extremely valuable parts of datacenter infrastructure, specifically when it comes to interconnections and other forms of AI infrastructure. That's what's really driving the business today.

The recent quarterly report was fantastic, even by Lumentum standards, which has produced a string of blowout earnings reports over the past year. Revenue was up 90% year over year, and 22% sequentially, that's an acceleration over the previous level. Earnings came in even better than expected. Adjusted operating margin expanded by 21 percentage points year over year to 32%. Beyond those headlines, Nvidia just made a $2 billion direct investment in Lumentum. Lumentum announced a brand new facility that it's building that should be online in 2028 that is directly related to its partnership with Nvidia, they're going to be providing the demand for it. It's like building a factory and you already have someone who's buying all the products. That bolstered its already cash-rich balance sheet. Lumentum now has over $3 billion of cash just sitting around. It's solidified that partnership between Nvidia and Lumentum, which is honestly its most important customer. Its guidance calls for 22% sequential growth in the current quarter, so things aren't slowing down just yet. This was a very strong report, and I completely see why the market reacted the way it did.

Jon Quast: When we were talking about Cisco, you're talking about a historically cyclical business that has this catalyst that is driving things. The Lumentum story is not any different. I think it's actually probably just the Cisco story on steroids right now because it's an even more extreme. Right now, over the past year, shares of Lumentum are up 1,200%, and currently shares trade for about 189 times earnings. Definitely not the more value-oriented 26, 27 times earnings that we were talking about with Cisco here. This is a high-flying stock that has a lot of very lofty expectations built into it almost entirely related to AI build-out, because, as to your point, Matt, previously, this was a business that came and went with the deployment of whatever wireless protocol was the new hot thing for telecom. When 3G was coming out, they had a lot of work. When 4G came out, and those periods in between, it was pretty dead. Again, when we're looking at Lumentum and those amazing numbers that we just saw, how do you reconcile that with these massive premium that you have in the stock, and does that make this a compelling investment, or is this just like, hey, this is really fun to watch, but I don't know if I want to be adding money to something like this.

Matt Frankel: Yeah, so this has been more than a 10-bagger in a year, like you correctly point out, but I would counter and say that this is not the same business it was a year ago. By the way, if you've never heard of Lumentum, back when it was primarily a telecom networking company, it was part of JDS Uniphase, so maybe you've heard of that. It was a spinoff. Let me tell you a quick story. About a year ago, Lumentum set a long-term target that they planned to get to "eventually of $3 billion in annualized run rate revenue and a 20% operating margin," and it wasn't even close to that a year ago. Now, fast forward a year to now, Lumentum has $3.2 billion of annual recurring revenue and a 32% operating margin. It has already surpassed its long-term targets in a year. Now management sees a path to $8 billion in annual run rate revenue, and that's not even including that new manufacturing facility with Nvidia, it's going to be its key customer that's going to be capable of an additional $5 billion of revenue when it comes online in 2028. Let me be totally clear at more than 30 times sales and 62 times even generous forward earnings estimates, Lumentum is not a cheap stock, but it could be the most attractive "expensive stock" that's on my radar right now.

Jon Quast: Yeah, I really like the point that Matt is making. I think the temptation for investors so often is, if a stock is already up big, therefore it can't keep going up big, and that's just a complete misconception. What it has done recently is not indicative of what it's going to do in the future. It's not as extreme as an example, but just would point to in Nvidia here. From 2023 through 2024, it was a nine-bagger, and since the end of 2024, it's still gone on to outperform the S&P 500 now a year and a half later. What was going on? The massive adoption curve of Nvidia GPUs, which has continued to grow and has continued to be sustainable over this long time period.

What it has done is not indicative of what it will do. I wouldn't say that Lumentum, just because it's up big doesn't mean it can't keep going up from here, and as I'm looking at it, I'm honestly not sure what to think with Lumentum, but I would take a slightly different angle than Matt. I understand his point. I think it's a very well-founded point. I will just point out that CEO Michael Hurlston recently said that its supply of products is trailing demand by about 30% right now. He's just throwing that number out there. When you look at its current growth, when you look at how much the hyperscalers intend to increase spending in the coming years, and then you look at the imbalance between the supply and demand for what it is. I would say that it's pretty pricey at over 30 times sales right now. I don't know if that is quite a good valuation. I think Lumentum may be a little out in front of itself right now. That said, if the market is truly growing at a rate that I can't comprehend, then this stock can continue to outperform from here.

Tyler Crowe: Looking through it myself, one of the things that stood out in terms of, we see all these AI infrastructure build-out numbers that are overwhelming and how big they are. Sometimes you look at it and make, but is this really going to do that? Because maybe it's just a commodity product or something like that. One of the things that is interesting about what Lumentum is doing with fiber optics and some of its products that it sells, for example, to Nvidia, the big selling point that it has is like more compute for less power, making systems more efficient because your transfer of data from one place to, it just makes it more efficient. This is something I've been harping on, as we've had these discussions, too, is the idea of the way that we are growing consumption, whether it be power, water, just usage of AI on its current path it seems unsustainable.

We've always talked about the gains in efficiency that are going to make it more possible. Because Lumentum sits in that efficiency gains realm, it seems more likely to do what it's saying versus, I don't know, somebody just throwing together commodity parts together to satisfy some demand. That seems like one of the more likely places in AI build-out that we'll struggle to do as well. Even though almost I am aghast at its current valuation to your guys' points of it might being worth it. These are the particularities of an investment, these would make it more worth it to look at growth versus being scared away by, you could say, high stock prices.

Well, that's a lot about AI, two similar stories with Lumentum, Cisco, and now for our next segment, we're going to do something completely different and just go away from AI as much as possible after the break. Quick reminder. As always, if you want to get your questions in, email us at podcast@fool.com. That's podcast@fool.com. Our three requests for all of these is No. 1, keep it Foolish. No. 2, keep it short enough. I can read it on air, and No. 3, we cannot give personalized advice. Try to make it somewhat generic to how should investors do this? What do we think about a stock? Because we can't give you one-on-one advice. We're not registered investment advisors. Just keep those three things in mind. We'd love to get as many questions as you can.

Today's question comes in from Tyler Grossman. His question is, I know everyone has a big AI kick right now as the boom keeps going. We just had two segments on it. It seems that almost every company has a big increase in revenue and profit, it's tied to AI. I'm relatively new to investing and tried to look to diversify my portfolio outside of AI stocks. A very sensible thing for somebody who's new at this to look to diversify immediately. My question is, what are some hidden gems outside of the AI world to keep an eye help diversify my portfolio. Thanks from Tyler. Jon, I've let Matt go first with the other couple segments. I'm going to give you honors. What are some of the companies when you're thinking non AI stocks to diversify portfolio, what are you looking at?

Jon Quast: Yeah, I absolutely love this question, Tyler. Before I give some answers, I do want to temper expectations because I think that maybe behind the question is the thought that, what if AI is a bubble, and what if the AI bubble pops? I just want to be clear that if it is a bubble and it does pop, you're talking some of the largest cap stocks out there are going to go down. The whole market is going to go down and that's normal. Even when we diversify our portfolio, there can be non-correlated things that do go down below for what we purchase them at. I don't want to say that these stocks would be immune to a stock market correction or a crash if AI goes south. But I think that when we talk about diversity here, it really depends on what our goals are. If you're just looking for a solid, there are solid options out there. They're not going to go up a ton, but they're probably not going to go down a ton either. I would look at things like Pepsi, McDonald's, just these bellwether things that perform reasonably well in and out of cycles. But they're not a lot of growth there.

But I wanted to bring some more growthy ideas that don't have an AI component. Two of these, I would consider them more hidden gems. The first one I want to talk about is shoe company Deckers, this would be a good one to keep an eye on for someone looking for non AI diversification. There's multiple reasons why I think that Deckers is a cool company. First, it has grown a lot in recent years, but growth continues to be good, so up 7% in the most recent quarter, that's not outstanding, but it's not bad either for a company that's already grown so much in recent years. Its gross profit margin is about 60%. That's one of the best gross profit margins in the shoe business industry. Third, it has a debt-free balance sheet, and if you think about maybe challenging economic times, I think that you want a company with a strong financial position, a strong balance sheet, and Deckers has that. Then finally, management routinely repurchases shares that boosts the per share profits at a better rate than revenue. I think Deckers can be a solid performer from here.

That was symbol DECK, and the other one I would point out here is Casella Waste Systems, and this is ticker symbol CWST. I would have said waste management here, but I know that our listeners like more hidden stocks and so I want to point out Casella. This does very similar thing to waste management. It's garbage, it's recycling, it's transfer stations, it's landfills, all this stuff. But it's not as big as some of the other players in the space. Because of that, it's been able to systematically gobble up competitors in its Northwest USA region, bolt on these other companies. It's spent about $2 billion since 2018, acquiring a billion in annual revenue. Pretty good deals, and it's been able to grow its profits because oftentimes these are adjacent markets and it can enjoy some cost synergies there. A business like this, very resilient to economic pressures, we have to take out the trash regardless of what the stock market is doing. It's down about 30% right now from its all-time high, and that's its largest pullback in over a decade. I feel like it's a timely stock to bring out.

Tyler Crowe: Jon, to your point about Deckers, all I can say is, I can see why they have gross margins like that when I end up buying my HOKA trail running shoes every once in a while from them. Yes, confirm good pricing power on whatever they do. Matt, what are you looking at for non-AI stocks right now?

Matt Frankel: This was a harder question than you might have thought to answer, just to Jon's point, if an AI bubble does pop, there are a lot of AI adjacent stocks that you might not think of. The financial sector is one of my big focus areas. There's so much AI that permeates even through the traditional banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. They're investing so much in AI right now. The insurance industry, Progressive is one of my favorite stocks right now, but they're considered the AI leader of insurance. There's so many little AI has its claws in a lot of things. I'm going to try to name just a few that are on my watch list that have little exposure to AI. I don't want to say none. Trex is one of them, T-R-E-X. I'm a big proponent of housing right now and especially people investing in their homes, I think we're going to see a refinancing wave whenever interest rates decide to turn. Trex will be a big beneficiary of that. Companies like Home Depot have specifically called out higher interest rates and the reason why people are delaying big projects. I look at some of these companies. It's even Home Depot, it's like a loaded spring right now when people decide to really pull the trigger on projects. Trex is one.

As boring as it might seem to some people, Berkshire Hathaway, I think is a tremendous value right now down significantly from all time highs, massive cash stockpile. If you are afraid of an AI bubble causing the entire stock market to fall at some point, Berkshire is in arguably the best position of any company in the world to take advantage of it with about $400 billion in cash. Berkshire's management they're artists when it comes to value investing. After the financial crisis, they painted a masterpiece when it came to the Goldman Sachs and Bank of America investments that Bank of America, they essentially got for free in the wake of the financial crisis. They had warrants that they literally got for free because they made a preferred equity investment.

Beyond that, Disney is another one that's toward the top of my list. There's some AI there. The streaming side of the business is very AI-driven, especially when it comes to their advertising momentum. But Disney's cash cow is its in-person experiences and things like that. As someone who's been a fan of this company for a long time, they're investing heavily in their parks, which was long overdue. I think the market's discounting the potential of getting everyone's talking about $200 billion in AI infrastructure spending and things like that. They're spending $60 billion on amusement parks, and just like a lot of the AI infrastructure spending, a lot of investors are having a tough time wrapping their head around that number and how they're going to get a good ROI, but I really think they will. Disney is one that's on my radar, so there's three ideas for me. Hopefully that helps.

Tyler Crowe: Yep, five is actually pretty good. We got Deckers. We got Casella Waste Systems. We got Trex, Berkshire, and Disney. That's a pretty good basket of non-AI players.

As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and it's not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, check out our show notes. Thanks to our producer, Dan Boyd and the rest of The Motley Fool team for Matt, Jon, and myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

Bank of America is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Jon Quast has positions in PepsiCo. Matt Frankel, CFP has positions in Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walt Disney. Tyler Crowe has positions in Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Arista Networks, Berkshire Hathaway, Costco Wholesale, Deckers Outdoor, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Lumentum, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Progressive, Trex, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $320 calls on McDonald's and short January 2028 $340 calls on McDonald's. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.