Nvidia Spectrum-X silicon photonics switches enter full mass production, with 75% fewer lasers and 80% lower power
Nvidia announced on August 14 via its official X account that Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon photonics switches have entered full mass production, the first commercially scaled 200G/lane CPO Ethernet switch system, with CoreWeave, Lambda Labs and Oracle as initial customers.
On August 14, Nvidia announced via its official X account that Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon photonics switches have entered full mass production. The system is the world's first commercially scaled 200G/lane CPO Ethernet switch. Coming after the May production-stage announcement, full mass production marks CPO technology's transition from product validation to large-scale commercial deployment.
Spectrum-X is built on the new-generation Spectrum-6 switch ASIC, with single-chip bandwidth of 102.4 Tb/s, integrating 32 silicon photonics engines and supporting 512 200G lanes. The flagship SN6800 configures four ASICs in a 5U chassis for 409.6 Tb/s aggregate switching and 512 800 Gb/s ports.
Compared with traditional pluggable optical modules, Spectrum-X reduces laser count by approximately 75 percent, lowers whole-system power by approximately 80 percent, raises MTBF by 10x, and reduces optical loss from approximately 22dB to approximately 4dB. Initial customers include CoreWeave, Lambda Labs and Oracle, all AI cloud and compute-infrastructure providers. Manufacturing is split between TSMC for silicon photonics fabrication, Lumentum for laser chips, SPIL for chip-level packaging and testing, and Hon Hai for full system assembly. China A-share CPO-related stocks broadly rallied on August 17, with the CSI Communications Equipment Index gaining more than 4 percent.