Nvidia Executive Is Bullish on CPO Rollout, Seemingly Refuting SemiAnalysis Narrative
Part of the reason the market is tanking today is that SemiAnalysis sent a report to its institutional clients making a negative call on the CPO (co-packaged optics) rollout.
Part of the reason the market is tanking today is that SemiAnalysis sent a report to its institutional clients making a negative call on the CPO (co-packaged optics) rollout, saying delays are highly likely based on their meetings at Computex.
I was going to write this up later this week, but given its importance to the market today, I figured I should publish a snippet now.
I interviewed an Nvidia networking executive at Computex who seemingly refutes the Semianalysis narrative and basically said the opposite on CPO. Read below.
Gilad Shainer, Nvidia senior vice president of Networking, who worked for 19 years at Mellanox:
What is the biggest thing in the world of networking? (Tae question)
“Today the most exciting stuff is co-packaged optics. That’s the most exciting stuff that’s kind of the leading edge from a technology perspective.”
When is CPO going to ramp (Tae)?
“We’re ready to start shipping. We have, one of our partners, Lambda, they just released a blog that they’ve got some switches on CPO. We’re going to ramp up CPO second half of the year. And you’re going to see more and more CPOs. And we’re starting on scale out. And we already mentioned that in the Feynman generation, now we’re doing Vera Rubin, next is going to be Feynman.”
Is this going to be 10% to 20% of AI servers? (Tae)
“We think we think that we will start seeing adoption. We believe that co-packaged optics is the best technology for scale out. In Feynman is gonna start being on scale up too. So if it would be my choice, my decision, I would like to use co-packaged optics everywhere that uses optical network.”
Net Takeaway: This was an in-person, one-on-one interview at Computex. Beyond what he said, the general vibe and body language I saw from Gilad was VERY enthusiastic about the CPO ramp, both near term and long term. Take that for what it’s worth.