Copackaged optics have officially found their killer app - of course it's AI

SC25 Power is becoming a major headache for datacenter operators as they grapple with how to support ever larger deployments of GPU servers - so much so that the AI boom is now driving the adoption of a technology once thought too immature and failure-prone to merit the risk.

We're talking, of course, about co-packaged optical (CPO) switching. 

At the SC25 supercomputing conference in St. Louis this week, Nvidia revealed that GPU-bit barn operators Lambda and CoreWeave would be adopting its Quantum-X Photonics CPO switches alongside deployments at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Nvidia has some competition: Broadcom showed off its own Tomahawk 5- and 6-based CPO switches. But while CPO switching is poised to take off in 2026, getting to this point has been a journey - and it's far from over.

So what's driving the CPO transition? In the words of former Top Gear host Jeremy ...