By byBrian Beeler
Publication Date: 2026-08-15 18:31:00
NVIDIA has moved Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics, its co-packaged optics (CPO) Ethernet switch platform, into full production. The company puts the gains at 4x fewer lasers, 5x lower power consumption, and 10x higher mean time between incidents, and it named the five manufacturing partners building the switch at each stage of the supply chain. The milestone lands as the Vera Rubin compute platform it is designed to network moves toward its own production shipments this fall.
Inside the Co-Packaged Optics Switch
Conventional switches rely on pluggable optical transceivers, discrete modules that each carry their own laser and plug into the switch faceplate. Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics instead integrates optical engines directly adjacent to the switching silicon, built on co-packaged optics with 200Gb/s SerDes. Removing the pluggable tier is what drives the laser count down by a factor of four, and fewer lasers mean fewer discrete components that can fail in a fabric that may span hundreds of thousands of links.
Those failure points are the reason the reliability figure matters more than the power figure for most operators. NVIDIA’s 10x higher mean time between incidents is a claim about how often something in the optical path takes a link down, not about raw throughput. Lowering the thermal and electrical footprint of the networking tier also frees power headroom within the data center envelope for accelerator compute, a concern that drives NVIDIA’s 800 VDC power…