By @SiliconANGLE
Publication Date: 2026-03-02 21:34:00
Nvidia Corp. today announced plans to invest in Lumentum Holdings Inc. and Coherent Corp., two publicly traded suppliers of optical networking equipment.
Each company is set to receive $2 billion. Nvidia stated that the sum includes a “multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and future access” rights to certain laser components. In the case of Coherent, the deal also encompasses other optical networking products.
Last March, Nvidia debuted two data center switch families that use an emerging packet transmission technology called co-packaged optics, or CPO. Lumentum and Coherent both make laser components for CPO systems. In September, the former company launched an effort to grow its CPO component production capacity.
The servers that make up artificial intelligence clusters are connected by fiber-optic cables. Switches turn packets into light before it’s sent through a fiber-optic cable and then turn the light beam back into digital data. Historically, the task was performed by standalone devices called pluggable transceivers.
The CPO technology that Nvidia integrated into its switch portfolio last year removes the need for standalone pluggable transceivers. It integrates a pluggable transceiver directly into switches, which reduces the amount of hardware that data center operators must buy. The technology also reduces network power usage.
CPO switches use miniature laser emitters to turn data into light that can be transmitted over fiber-optic cables….
