Untangled
CPO, short copper, and the test bench underneath
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Everyone is looking at the same three layers in the CPO value chain. Switch silicon (Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑, Broadcom AVGO 0.00%↑) and XPU-side photonics (Marvell MRVL 0.00%↑ and MediaTek $2454.TW) get most of the print along with the major laser names from Lumentum LITE 0.00%↑, Coherent COHR 0.00%↑, Furukawa $5801.T, Applied Optoelectronics AAOI 0.00%↑.
The system OEMs putting the boxes together round out the rest of what people watch. Nobody’s pricing the cable layer underneath properly. Fiber attach, CPO cabling, the connectors and cable assembly behind them. Cheap on the multiple, full beta to the ramp, and little institutional coverage on them. Short copper picks up where CPO doesn’t reach, especially in a scale up networking environment. And the test bench underneath has to sign off on every part before any of it ships.
Inspired by Jukan’s tweet below, I tried to map out the CPO value chain as well as adjacent themes in the data center interconnect that might be worth looking at.
