Zephyr
AI & Semiconductor Analyst at Citrini Research
Copper connectivity stays in Nvidia's racks longer than anyone modeled, a win for Amphenol and Credo. Per @SemiAnalysis_, the Kyber NVL144 rack is delayed more than 12 months to 2028 because its PCB midplane cannot be made at scale, and the NVL72x2 backup was cancelled. Co-packaged optics will not arrive until the Feynman generation, so the shift away from copper in scale-up moves out with it. x.comÂ
Credo Technology's copper interconnects should do well after SemiAnalysis reported that Nvidia's Kyber NVL144 rack has been delayed by more than 12 months to 2028 and its NVL72x2 back-to-back architecture was cancelled, leaving Rubin Ultra with a limited scale-up domain. x.comÂ
Copper is not a bullish play, as it is arguably used more as a transitional tool over the next two years. That holds even though NVIDIA's CEO said they will need more copper, alongside optics and CPO. x.comÂ
Credo is a main winner if the story @HyungsokAhn describes proves true, in which copper, pluggables, legacy power and testing benefit while co-packaged optics and 800VDC lose out. x.comÂ
Copper scale-up is dead, making optics hyper bullish, especially Lumentum. Nvidia's Rubin NVLink Nyquist cut from 56 to 47 GHz signals failure: reflections matter, and bidirectional links make them worse. Feynman will have to use 16-wavelength DWDM ring-modulator CPO at roughly 50-64G NRZ. x.com x.comÂ
Copper's rally is driven mainly by financial players rather than physical demand, making it unsustainable in the short term. Inventories keep rising against the shortage narrative, commercial hedgers are near multi-year shorts while CTAs hold multi-year highs, and China's credit impulse is deteriorating. The cycle and seasonality point to a peak in late August or early September, and a weekly rising wedge signals exhaustion. The long-term picture stays bullish after a reset into Q4 or Q1 2027. … Show more
Alphabet and Broadcom own the 2027 window because their TPU optical-switching scale-up is the only proven alternative as Nvidia hits packaging and interconnect walls. Per SemiAnalysis, Nvidia's flagship Kyber NVL144 rack slipped over 12 months to 2028 and its NVL72x2 backup was cancelled, while the 2-die Rubin Ultra delivers about half the per-package performance and co-packaged optics won't come until Feynman. That breaks Nvidia's new-rack-every-year promise, the core of its moat premium. x.comÂ
POET Technologies and Sivers, as co-packaged optics pure plays, lose because CPO adoption has moved right by a full generation. SemiAnalysis reports Nvidia's flagship Kyber NVL144 rack is delayed over 12 months to 2028 and its NVL72x2 backup was cancelled, while optical scale-up won't arrive until Feynman. Packaging and interconnect hit physical walls in the same cycle, and the entire thesis for these names rests on CPO timing. x.comÂ
Copper could see extreme demand from the AI buildout over the next few years, enough that $8,000 may end up being the Wave 5 target zone. x.comÂ
Semtech benefits from Nvidia's strategy of scaling up with copper for as long as possible. At Computex 2026, Jensen Huang said to use copper wherever you can and optics only where you must. Nvidia's Blackwell NVL72 racks use thousands of copper cables rather than fiber to link GPUs within a rack, and keeping data intact over that copper relies heavily on signal-integrity chips from Semtech's active copper cable alliance. x.comÂ