The AI compute race has entered its second half, and bandwidth and power are now make-or-break. Intel's OCI chiplet at OFC 2026 signals that the convergence of photonics and electronics at the chip level has arrived, rebuilding data center architecture rather than merely improving specs.

Edgecore admitted 1.6T LPO is "not yet successful," so the stopgap is gone and CPO can no longer wait a generation. Three MSAs at OFC 2026 push CPO toward swappable engines, while SONiC only now has the models it needs. Hardware decides who ships; software decides who deploys at scale.

Broadcom's CPO session skipped the theory and laid out field failure data from three product generations, because what holds CPO back was never power, but how to fix it when it breaks. With reliability now the selling point, the OCI spec and a 2027 fourth generation are opening three orders for Taiwan's supply chain.

Meta, Broadcom and AMD jointly define the OCI 200G line interface spec, betting scale-up optical interconnect on micro-ring DWDM, bidirectional single fiber, external lasers and NRZ. It is a buyer-supplier alliance taking on NVIDIA's vertical integration, and its external laser clause draws a clear spec for CW DFB and ELSFP suppliers.

Fourteen speakers argued for three hours without ever defining "slow" — the same OCI spec got four different answers under six definitions. Reported pJ/bit ranged from 0.369 to 20, and most of that 54x gap is measurement boundary. The real takeaway isn't who won: every timeline converges on 2027–2028.