COMPUTEX 2026 The sun is slowly but surely setting on copper interconnects, Marvell CEO Matt Murphy claimed in his Computex keynote this week. Within the next decade the IP house expects photons to take the place of electrons and change the way datacenters are built and run in the process. And, if Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is right, the widespread transition to silicon photonics technologies could make Marvell the next trillion dollar company. With a market cap of $191 billion, Marvell still has a long way to go, not that stopped Wall Street investors from sending the company’s share price on a 30 percent rally on the proclamation. However, Huang’s prediction, made during Marvell’s Computex keynote this week, may be more than flattery. The large-scale deployment of AI infrastructure for training, inference, and agentic systems is already reshaping datacenter networks and pushing copper interconnects to the limit. “The distance a signal can travel over a copper cable is inversely proportional to the bandwidth, so every time you double the bandwidth, you have to cut the distance in half,” Murphy explained. Today the fastest network interconnects operate at 200 Gbps per lane, but at these speeds copper cables can only carry a signal about 2.5 meters, effectively limiting interconnects. With the launch of its next-gen NVSwitch silicon in its Vera Rubin platform, Nvidia will double this again to 400 Gbps, halving copper’s reach once again. There’s a reason the NVL72’s switches are located in the middle of the rack. “Going forward, even the connections within the rack will become optical,” Murphy said. “The whole industry knows this is coming. So, we’ve been preparing for this moment, not just Marvell, but the industry.” Optics offer much greater reach, but the tech isn’t without compromise. Pluggable optics are not only power hungry but they also fail. Power consumption is one of the reasons why Nvidia first revealed its NVL72 rack systems, Huang explained that using optics would have added another 20 kilowatts to the system’s then monstrous 120 kilowatt load. “You use optics wherever you must, you use copper wherever you can,” Huang said during Marvell’s keynote. While Huang expects copper interconnects to remain relevant for a while longer, Marvell is preparing for a future in which even PCB traces will be replaced by fiber optic cables. In 2020 Marvell acquired Inphi, which specialized in building optoelectrical interconnects, and more recently the company dropped billions to acquire Celestial AI’s silicon photonics interconnect tech. Then in March, Nvidia invested $2 billion in Marvell to, among other things, advance its silicon photonics interconnect tech. “We build optical modules that contain all the electronics needed to drive and modulate the laser and transmit data over long distances,” Murphy said. At copper’s end “Think about 10 years in the future and it’s a world where a lot of the copper connections are gone,” Murphy said. “This is a world where then distance doesn’t matter… that’s a profound change.” All modern datacenter infrastructure and software has been designed around the constraints of distances. “With optics, distance doesn’t matter. So now we can change the size of the scale up domain from 72 or 144 XPUs or GPUs to 1,000 or more, all optically interconnected,” he said. “The implications for workloads are enormous.” But it’s not just GPUs. Murphy explains that when everything from CPUs and GPUs to memory and storage are optically interconnected, they will no longer need to be in the same box. “Modern AI servers are composed of a certain number of CPUs, XPUs, memory, and network interfaces, and the reason they’re all on the same system is because of distance,“ he explained. “Imagine a completely disaggregated architecture, XPUs in one system, memory in another, agentic CPUs in another.” This means these resources can be reconfigured on the fly to achieve the ideal ratio of CPU to GPUs to system memory for a specific workload. Google is already doing this to a lesser extent with its TPU clouds. While the ratio of CPUs and memory to GPUs can’t be reconfigured on the fly, the use of optical circuit switches means the number and shape (topology) of Google’s TPUs can be adjusted to maximize inference or training performance. This also has implications beyond AI. Even if the bubble collapses and AI infrastructure demand evaporates, one can imagine AWS and other major cloud providers using silicon photonics or co-packaged optics to disaggregate compute resources and then reassemble them a la carte. Battling Broadzilla Marvell is a long way from a trillion dollar market cap and getting there assumes a certain other IP house doesn’t eat their lunch. Broadcom, whose market cap already surpasses $2 trillion, and whose customers include some of the largest hyperscalers in the world, including Google and Meta, has also been amassing a broad portfolio of silicon photonics and optics tech over the past several years. These technologies include co-packaged optics for switches and XPUs, as well as DSPs for high bandwidth pluggables. Much like Murphy, Broadcom’s CPU Hock Tan expects that photonics will replace most copper interconnects eventually, just not tomorrow. “I can see a point in time in the future when it matters as the only way to do it,” Tan told analysts late last year. “we are not quite there yet.” “The final, final, straw is when you can’t do it well in pluggable optics,” Tan said. “Then you go to silicon photonics.” ®