Breaking the Copper Wall: Co-Packaged Optics and the Materials Race in AI

As AI workloads surge, copper interconnects are hitting hard limits in power and bandwidth density. Co-packaged optics (CPO) solves this by moving optical-to-electrical conversion directly onto the chip package next to switch and compute silicon. This delivers dramatically lower energy per bit and greater bandwidth density—central to NVIDIA, Broadcom, and hyperscalers’ roadmaps. This STEM Talk explores why CPO is vital for AI compute economics and key materials challenges.