Nvidia released this video of its photonics co-packaged optics （CPO） switch with Lambda.

The AI race is not only about stronger GPUs， but about wasting far less power while those GPUs talk to each other.

With co-packaged optics （CPO）， NVIDIA is putting the light-based communication parts much closer to the main networking chip， instead of placing them as separate plug-in modules at the edge of the switch.

From NVIDIA's official blog on this

"co-packaged optics （CPO） connects directly to the token economy. Network power is overhead： it keeps GPUs connected but doesn't generate tokens. Network failures are also overhead： they turn provisioned GPU capacity into idle capacity. CPO addresses both by reducing network power draw and removing a large class of pluggable optical components from the fabric.

A 128，000-GPU data center using traditional pluggable transceivers requires roughly 655，000 discrete transceiver modules across the switching fabric. Each one is a potential failure point. CPO removes that component class entirely.

Agentic workloads change the pressure on the network. A traditional inference request is relatively self-contained. An agentic request can involve planning， retrieval， tool use， multiple model calls， and follow-up reasoning. More data moving across the cluster. More points where network latency or failure affects the outcome.

Multi-agentic inference needs elastic and resilient data movement， so GPUs are not waiting for data， while maintaining tokens per second and fast time to first token."