CPO

Co-packaged optics, or CPO, means moving the optical engine out of a pluggable module and placing it right next to the switch chip. The point is power: driving light across a board through conventional transceivers burns energy, and CPO shortens that path to save it. It is the leading candidate for breaking the optics power wall at scale, and it is being taken seriously now because interconnect power is turning into a genuine limiter on how large a fabric can grow.

The catch is practical. Fusing optics onto the switch package reshapes the supply chain and makes modules harder to service or swap, so reliability and serviceability problems could stall adoption and leave power consumption high. The players attached to this shift — switch-silicon leader Broadcom, plus POET Technologies, Ayar Labs and Celestica — are exposed to whether the industry decides the power savings are worth the integration risk.