Is there still hope for CPO optical modules
Small amounts of CPO may start to appear in 2026, but real deployment at scale looks more likely to arrive in 2027/8 or later. Co-packaged optics (CPO) technology, a key enabler for next-generation data center architectures, promises unprecedented bandwidth density and power efficiency by tightly integrating optical engines with switch silicon. As AI clusters push beyond 100 Tb/s per node, the gap between what silicon can generate and what traditional copper interconnects can deliver is widening fast. From Jensen Huang showcasing CPO switches at GTC 2025 to a wide range of vendors demonstrating optical engines integrated inside ASIC packages at OFC 2025, CPOs are everywhere. However, it's worth noting that Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Arista and a long-standing visionary in data centre. In recent years, optical transceiver technology has been steadily shifting toward placing the optics closer to the Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC).
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