CPO & Silicon Photonics — Strategy
Updated 6/19/2026
Where CPO & Silicon Photonics is heading over the next 12 months, grounded in product-axis evidence and verbatim demand from the last 90 days. The judgment column is the engine's read — operators verify and refine.
Product trajectories
Ayar Labs TeraPHY Optical I/O Chiplet — optical I/O chiplet ↗ rising
Opportunity: Scale-up GPU domains beyond a single rack — copper SerDes runs out at multi-rack distances and pluggable optics burn too much power at chiplet edge; in-package optical I/O is the alternative to expand the coherent compute domain.
TeraPHY is the canonical 'optical I/O at the package' product in the topic. NVIDIA strategic check + Wiwynn 1024-GPU demo + monolithic GF process = strongest non-switch CPO play. Open question is whether merchant accelerators (vs NVIDIA's own integrated photonics) actually adopt it in volume.
NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics CPO Switch — switch → steady
Opportunity: Scale-up InfiniBand fabrics for AI GPU clusters need lower-power, higher-radix switches; CPO replaces pluggables to cut optical power at 100+ Tbps switch radix.
Quantum-X is the flagship CPO product in the topic — NVIDIA is the demand anchor, TSMC COUPE is the SiPh process, and Coherent/Lumentum are locked in as ELS suppliers. The architecture (multiple SiPh engines per switch ASIC + remote DFB lasers) is now the de-facto CPO reference design others must match.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics CPO Ethernet Switch — switch · weak signal
Opportunity: Hyperscaler Ethernet scale-out fabrics need 1.6T-per-port radix without paying full pluggable-optics power budget; CPO is the bet to land it at 102.4T.
Spectrum-X CPO is the Ethernet sibling to Quantum-X and pulls the same supplier stack (Lumentum + Coherent ELS). H2 2026 shipment timing makes 2025-2026 the supplier qualification window — laser, fiber attach and packaging vendors that miss it lose two years.
Broadcom Bailly 51.2T CPO Switch (TH5) — switch · weak signal
Opportunity: Pluggable optics power is the wall at 51.2T+ switch radix; Broadcom's 50% optical power reduction quantifies the CPO value prop hyperscalers buy on.
Broadcom is the merchant-silicon CPO leader competing with NVIDIA's vertically integrated stack. Bailly's public demo + concrete power-savings number is the case study hyperscalers cite when greenlighting CPO procurement.
Ayar Labs SuperNova Remote Laser Source — external laser source · weak signal
Opportunity: Lasers cannot live inside the package next to a 700W GPU; remote multi-wavelength CW lasers (16λ, ~256 mW) are the architectural bet that lets in-package SiPh engines exist at all.
SuperNova is the ELS half of Ayar's stack — analogous to what Lumentum/Coherent supply NVIDIA, but vertically integrated. Validates that 'remote laser + WDM' is the CPO architecture everyone now follows.
External Laser Source (ELS) / CW DFB Laser Module for CPO — laser module · weak signal
Opportunity: CPO removes the laser from the optical engine — that demand shifts entirely to standalone high-power CW DFB / multi-wavelength ELS modules, a brand new SKU category laser vendors are racing to own.
ELS is the most direct money-good adjacency to CPO: Coherent's InP CapEx step-up + dual-sourcing into NVIDIA = a structurally new product line. Whoever holds the InP DFB capacity wins the bottleneck for the next two CPO generations.
See the Products and Hiring modules for the full landscape and who's investing in which direction.