Research|Optics: OCP 2026 Points to NPO Adoption and New Demand from Copper Replacement

We attended the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose from October 12 to 15, including keynotes from NVIDIA, Broadcom and AMD, and more than twenty optical-interconnect sessions. We also met with Marvell, Credo, Ciena, Cisco, Amphenol, Lightmatter, MACOM and others.

Our week in San Jose yielded four key themes, discussed below. This note concludes with detailed notes for each of the companies we engaged with.

Contents

1. Key Themes\
2. NVIDIA: a CPO version of NVL576 but keeps NPO on the table\
3. NPO: How everyone else responded\
4. NPO: What users want\
5. Pluggables strike back: XPO and USFP and their impact on NPO and CPO adoption\
6. Light sources, fiber and test: the constraints in focus at OCP\
7. Standards and the ecosystem: MSAs landing in quick succession; an argument against NPO multi-sourcing?\
8. Copper’s evolving role\
9. Company notes

1. Key Themes

Theme 1: Scale-up is still a copper/optics mix; the debate is between NPO and CPO and how outstanding issues with both are resolved