[CPO Deep Dive 6/6] Every CPO Player's Roadmap: Beyond the Big Four, a Whole Line of Challengers

CPO is not one road — it is more than a dozen parallel bets. The four giants that control switch silicon and accelerator platforms each have their own entry point: some go after scale-up first, some scale-out; some rely on advanced packaging to glue it together; one has exited modules altogether to focus on optical I/O. Beyond them is a whole line of challengers surviving on differentiated technology and funding. This article is a CPO scorecard: who already has a clear product timeline and who is still turning a story into samples — laying out each player's roadmap, specs and positioning in one place.

1. The One-Line Take: CPO Is a Dozen-Plus Paths Betting at the Same Table

Our stance up front: it is still too early to ask "who will win CPO," because it is not a single technology at all — it is a simultaneous bet across more than a dozen architectures, materials, packaging approaches and business models.

Some bet on scale-up, others on scale-out; some on hybrid bonding, others on fan-out; some on external light sources, others on microLEDs; some on building complete systems themselves, others on selling just an optical I/O chip to everyone else. These bets don't fully conflict and may coexist for years. So rather than asking "who wins," it's more useful to map "who has bet on what, and how far along that bet is" — which is exactly what this scorecard is for.

2. Why Take Stock Now: From Samples to Pilots, the Paths Are Diverging

CPO used to sit at "proof of concept," where the differences between players were hard to see. But as several platforms move into pilot production with clear product timelines, the paths are diverging and positioning is becoming clear — now is exactly the moment to lay every player side by side.

A useful dividing line is the bandwidth threshold: the 6.4Tbps-class optical engine has become the coordinate that several major players are independently targeting. Whoever can deliver something shippable at that threshold moves from "story" to "product." Below, we look first at the Big Four, then at the challengers.

3. The Big Four: Each Entering Through a Different Door

NVIDIA — scale-up first, betting on modularity.

Read the full analysis on vocus (in Chinese): https://vocus.cc/article/6a6028ebfd897800018cad27