Nvidia's $6.5 Billion Bet on Light: How Computex 2026 Marked the End of Copper in AI Data Centers

The $6.5+ Billion Supply Chain Sprint

Since early March 2026, Nvidia has deployed at least $6.5 billion across five strategic photonics and optical connectivity companies, according to CNBC reporting . The spending breaks down as follows:

• $2 billion each in Lumentum, Coherent, and Marvell (announced in March), securing non-exclusive purchase agreements and R&D commitments for advanced lasers and silicon photonics .
• Up to $3.2 billion in Corning (announced May 6). Nvidia paid $500 million upfront for warrants—with an option for up to $2.7 billion more in equity over three years—to build three new U.S. optical fiber factories dedicated to AI data centers .
• Participation in Ayar Labs’ $500M Series E funding round, signaling a deeper push into chip-to-chip optical interconnects .

Production Switches and the Copper Wall

Beyond investments, Nvidia announced its Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics switches, built entirely on CPO, are now in full production. The new generation targets scale-out and scale-across AI fabric deployments for the Vera Rubin platform .

At the Marvell Computex keynote, CEO Matt Murphy crystallized the urgency: for trillion-parameter AI workloads, connectivity—not compute density—is the dominant performance bottleneck . He described a “copper wall” where speed-of-light latency in electrical traces becomes the hard limit.

What Comes Next

TrendForce forecasts CPO penetration in AI data center optical modules could reach 35% by 2030, eventually displacing copper for all rack-scale interconnects. Copper will likely hold its ground in ultra-short-reach links until at least 2028 .

The strategy spans the entire stack: CPO at the switch level, silicon photonics for chip-to-chip links, and optical cabling throughout the facility . As Nvidia’s senior leadership has stated publicly, the goal isn’t to abandon copper immediately—it’s to build enough optical capacity to break through the limits electricity imposes on the next generation of AI .

At Computex 2026, the industry got the signal: the future of AI infrastructure runs on light.