By Tobias Mann
Publication Date: 2025-11-22 09:31:00
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.
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