The technologies still finding their category - the frontier beyond the frontier.
Two acquisitions, two days apart, at adjacent layers of the same stack. Credo's $873M cash-and-stock deal for DustPhotonics and Molex's Teramount buy tell the market the copper-era interconnect champions have decided the AI factory's fiber layer isn't something they're willing to source.
Samsung launched a silicon photonics foundry platform at OFC 2026, targeting 2028 PIC mass production and 2029 CPO services, pitching vertical integration of HBM, logic, packaging, and photonics against TSMC's production lead
The Chiplet Summit marked the transition from "chiplets as concept" to "chiplets as product." The winners won't be the ones with the best silicon. They'll be the ones with the best software and the deepest packaging ecosystem.
Lightwave Logic's deal with Tower Semiconductor puts polymer modulators into production silicon photonics. Meanwhile, III-V compounds are pushing 400G per lane. The fight to replace silicon's optical limitations is getting real.
Investments in Coherent and Lumentum, OFC 2026 timing, and the conspicuous absence of NVLink CPO. NVIDIA knows optical interconnects are the next bottleneck, and it's moving to own the solution.
Every new GPU generation pushes TDP higher. The industry's messy transition from air to liquid is no longer optional — it's a design constraint for every new build.