800G / 1.6T Co-Packaged Optics & Silicon Photonics module — optical interconnect / CPO

800G / 1.6T Co-Packaged Optics & Silicon Photonics module — optical interconnect / CPO

Companies committing: astera-labs, ayar-labs, celestica, credo-technology, semtech.

Opportunity: Scale-out beyond ~100K GPU clusters (verified Colossus class) is bandwidth-bound; pluggable optics are hitting reach/power limits, so the industry is racing to ship CPO at 800G→1.6T while still selling AEC for short reach.

Hottest cross-company signal in this dataset — Astera Labs alone has 7+ photonics-specific roles (test, validation, firmware, packaging) plus Ayar Labs verifying optical I/O IP and Celestica/Credo/Semtech all standing up GTM. CPO is moving from R&D to high-volume. Bottleneck named in JD: photonic packaging + thermal.