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@convequity

Convequity on X

Photonics Pt.4: OCS Roadmaps Are Splitting Convequity’s latest note examines how Optical Circuit Switching is diverging by workload. High-radix MEMS remains the practical choice for scale-out and training clusters that prioritise scheduled reconfiguration. Lower-latency silicon photonics is being pushed into the scale-up layer for inference, where millisecond switching is no longer acceptable. $GOOGL's V8i architecture is the clearest example. It moves OCS down into the scale-up domain for the first time and pairs it with 2.4T Coherent Lite modules that dramatically reduce fiber and port consumption. The combination is designed to close Google’s main networking gap versus NVIDIA. $NVDA's Feynman (2028) appears to be taking a dual approach: CPO for dense short-reach connections and OCS for larger cluster-level scale-out. Near-term deployments will likely rely on mature MEMS, with silicon photonics as the longer-term path once insertion loss improves. The broader OCS market is projected to grow from ~$400M in 2025 to over $2.5B by 2029 (58% CAGR). Silicon photonics offers a relatively open competitive field compared with MEMS, where incumbents hold stronger positions. We also re-examine CPO’s path forward and assess microLED as a more radical parallel alternative — one that inverts the industry’s “fewer, faster lanes” assumption and is physically confined to short-reach scale-up links. Full Part 4 is now live. Link in the comments.
@BlueDuckCap

BDC on X

This is obviously unsustainable. The larger the gap, the worse the crash. Semis are printing cash now - but for a buyer and seller relationship to be healthy over a long time, everyone, both sides, needs to make $. I think $AMZN can make $ because their flagship business sells compute capacity and their capex ramp has funded more capacity to sell. $META can work because their flagship biz benefits from internal AI and they may in fact have excess compute capacity to sell - which is a positive pivot. $GOOGL is less clear to me. Their flagship biz is soaking up internal compute because new entrants in search, gPT for one, have $750B in capex earmarked - not to sell compute but to improve their own frontier capabilities. At the same time, $GOOGL's external compute biz is going to do great - but in this theater they are also competing with AMZN/MSFT etc. So for $GOOGL there's no pivot opportunity akin to $META and there's 2x the capex need as the arms race accelerates for both internal and external needs.

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