Engineering CPO Is Easy - Scaling IT For AI Will Take An Ecosystem
The Next Platform, Friday, October 24th, 2025
It has taken a lot of dreaming and even more engineering, but the many promises of silicon photonics are starting to make their way into real products in the datacenter.
It doesn't hurt that high-bandwidth and low-latency interconnects are a necessity for GenAI platforms and that the world is willing to spend enormous amounts of money to fulfill the promises of superintelligence and its agentic AI killer app.
Scale out networks have been using pluggable optical transceivers for decades because of the need for network reach that is larger than can be built using electrical wires. And now, with co-packaged optics, the optical interconnect is being brought down into the package for datacenter switches and, in the future, for compute engines and even memory subsystems that feed into them.