Photonics is not new. Fiber optic cable has crossed oceans since the 1980s. The alpha was a physics calculation made years before this chart went vertical. Copper degrades beyond 2 meters at 200G+ SerDes speeds. At 100K+ GPU cluster scale, NVIDIA modeled optical transceiver power consumption at 10 to 20x traditional cloud data centers. The industry's own operating philosophy was "copper if you can, optics if you must." That "must" moment was always coming. Clusters were going to get large enough to make it physics, not preference. Once they did, the entire supply chain from InP substrates to silicon photonic foundries had years of underinvestment priced in. The chart shows photonics vocabulary in earnings calls across NVIDIA, Coherent, Lumentum, Broadcom and six others going back to 20
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