CPO Boom on the Horizon, Optical Modules Enter 'Arms Race'
NVIDIA locks CPO capacity with Lumentum, Coherent. Optical modules become next HBM as AI shifts from chip race to system efficiency war.
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In the relentless surge of artificial intelligence, market attention often focuses on the iterative improvements in GPU computing power itself, while easily overlooking the “nervous system” that supports this vast computing network.
While everyone is still fiercely debating the production capacity allocation for H100 and B200, NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang has already turned his gaze to deeper infrastructure—optical interconnects.
Recent market reports indicate that NVIDIA has invested $2 billion each in optical communications giants Lumentum and Coherent, while signing massive purchase commitments and securing future capacity rights.
This move may appear to be a financial investment on the surface, but in reality, it represents a “strategic blockade” of computing power infrastructure.
This signals a fundamental shift in the competitive logic of the AI industry chain: moving away from a pure competition in chip performance toward capital binding and capacity locking of upstream core supply chains.
Optical modules, especially Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) technology, are standing on the eve of a major explosion, and an “arms race” in optical interconnects has quietly begun.
