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.

Broadcom's "Open Ethernet" keynote talked standards on the surface, but really declared that Ethernet will take over in-rack scale-up, NVLink's deepest moat. Open specs grow the ecosystem while in-house silicon collects rent, and behind this two-layer play sits a whole new layer of demand for Taiwan's optical interconnect and CPO supply chain.