The market will see CPO, LPO, and pluggable transceivers coexist, with form factors chosen based on distance and power budget requirements for high-density AI connections. NVIDIA is reportedly growing its CPO switches and pluggable ecosystem side-by-side, indicating a diversified approach to optical I/O. The concept of "power budget" for high-density photonics connections is more accurately a cooling constraint, even with abundant energy.
Optical interconnect strategies are segmenting by use case and cooling capacity, not a single CPO replacement, impacting component demand across multiple form factors.