Scale-up optical interconnect looks like a seven-way melee, but there are really only two strategies, Fast-and-Narrow and Slow-and-Wide, each hitting a symmetric wall. Learn the yardstick first, then see how the seven approaches layer and coexist.

Goldman Sachs lifted its 2028 optical module market forecast to $148.5B, up 115% - but shipments were raised only 31%, implying ASPs up about 64%. Two-thirds of this growth comes from price, and what props up price is InP, short by more than 70%. The ceiling is high enough; the next year will be decided by the denominator.

With a three-year deal and a ~US$22.3M prepayment, Coherent has locked in the scarcest 6-inch InP wafers. This isn't ordinary procurement — it's supply insurance, marking the InP shortage's shift from waiting in line to grabbing capacity at the source, and forcing a choice between cheapest China capacity and Non-China supply insurance.

Twenty-four sessions at OCP APAC 2026 told the same story: the AI infrastructure bottleneck is shifting from how fast you compute to whether you can connect it and keep it running. Here is the full map, with an index of all 24 session notes.