Bechtolsheim & Friends Breathe Life Into Pluggable Optics One Last Time
The Next Platform, Friday, April 17th, 2026
Andy Bechtolsheim, legendary co-founder of Unix system maker Sun Microsystems and more than a few networking startups after that, has nothing against co-packaged optics. Well, except that thus far CPO modules have not been able to be manufactured in volume.
There is no question that co-packaged optics is coming to datacenters at this point, particularly with AI industry juggernaut Nvidia embracing CPO links on its Quantum X800 InfiniBand and Spectrum X800 Ethernet switches - previewed in June 2024, launched in March 2025 and shipping since December 2025.
Nvidia is also told customers in March this year at GTC that with the future 'Feynman' GPUs coming in 2028 that the NVSwitch 8 coherent memory scale up network at the heart of its rackscale systems will be moving to CPO as well.
This strongly implies that the Feynman GPU and whatever the next generation of Arm server CPU that Nvidia pairs with it - we don't have a codename as yet - will also have CPO ports.