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.

The keynote looked like a GPU show, but the real story is that AMD bet the Helios rack backbone on open Ethernet and wrote optical interconnect into the MI500 spec. That favors merchant optics, DSPs, and lasers — but order timing splits into near-term scale-out and longer-term scale-up.