"Science and Technology Board Daily" June 10 news. On the 9th local time, multiple stocks in the US optical communication sector fell, with Coherent plunging 11%, Lumentum down 8%, Ciena down 7%, Corning down 9%, and Arista down 3%.
The "extinguishing" of light may be related to a latest report from SemiAnalysis, which stated that 800VDC and CPO deployment timelines will both be delayed.
Regarding 800VDC, the report pointed out that this architecture has been questioned by hyperscale cloud providers, deployment is slowing down, and mass production shipments have been delayed to after 2028, while the 400VDC solution is still on track for deployment in the second half of the year.
Regarding CPO, the report bluntly said that the market expectation of deployment by 2027 is overly optimistic, and the actual deployment will be later than Wall Street's current general forecast. The report plans to lower its Scale-out CPO shipment forecasts for 2026 and 2027, expecting large-scale Scale-up CPO introduction in 2029, while the market had previously expected 2027-2028. In contrast, more NPO projects will enter mass production in the coming years.
For Scale-out CPO switches, the main bottleneck is system-level integration and yield. Even under optimistic assumptions, with optical engine and ASIC packaging yield at 95% and each ASIC integrating 32 COUPEs, the final system yield is only about 19%.
In response, Kim Tae, a well-known tech journalist and author of "The NVIDIA Way", holds a different view. He posted that NVIDIA's Senior Vice President of Networking, Gilad Shainer, made statements during an interview at COMPUTEX that seem to directly refute SemiAnalysis's view of "delayed large-scale CPO introduction."
According to the interview content released by Kim Tae, Shainer said that the most exciting technology in the networking field right now is CPO, and from a technological development perspective, it is the most cutting-edge and breakthrough direction.
"We are ready to start shipping (CPO). We will begin expanding CPO deployment scale in the second half of this year, and you will see more and more CPO products in the future. We will first deploy CPO in the Scale-out network... By the Feynman era, CPO will also enter the Scale-up network."
▌What is the specific progress of CPO deployment?
NVIDIA announced on June 2 that NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon photonics technology is now fully in mass production. The next-generation Spectrum-X switches are built based on optoelectronic integrated packaging technology, supporting NVIDIA Vera Rubin platforms to scale out and cross-region deploy AI factories in data centers.
Additionally, several companies in the industry chain have recently made statements:
- Foxconn Industrial Internet revealed in its survey minutes last month that CPO all-optical switch prototypes have started production and begun shipping, with capacity being deployed in multiple regions simultaneously, and further expansion expected next year.
- Tengjing Technology disclosed in its survey minutes the same month that its key CPO product, optical connectors, is under development and verification, with mass production schedule depending on customer verification and project progress.
- Darlight Optical stated at a shareholders' meeting on June 9 that it will build its first CPO-related automated trial production line before September, primarily producing FA (fiber arrays), with estimated small-volume mass production in about 6 months to 1 year, and already has one large potential buyer.
It is worth mentioning that Bernstein in a mid-May report analyzed the evolution pace of CPO: In the coming years, copper and optical interconnections will not be a zero-sum replacement but will coexist for different distances and application scenarios, evolving along the Scale-up and Scale-out paths respectively. CPO still faces many practical challenges before widespread adoption, including manufacturing yield, testing complexity, fiber coupling precision, and cloud service providers' concerns about maintainability and supplier concentration.
