"Copper Retreat, Light Advance"? Nvidia or "Light and Copper Together" Corrects Market Expectations, CPO Concept Plummets

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On March 17, the concept of high-speed copper cable connections opened strong and then fluctuated weaker. By midday, New Asia Electronics hit the daily limit, with several concept stocks like Shenyu Shares, Wol Nuclear Materials, Luxshare Precision, and others rising together; meanwhile, the CPO concept plummeted, with Tianfu Communication dropping over 9%, and Guangku Technology, Changxin Bochuang, Robote, Deke Li, and others falling.

This A-share sector movement may stem from the revision of copper narratives at the GTC conference. At this event, Jensen Huang previewed the next-generation Feynman system. The system is equipped with new GPUs, LPUs, a new CPU called Rosa, Bluefield 5, and Kyber architecture, and supports both copper and CPO expansion, which the market interprets as confirmation of the “optical and copper combined” technical approach.

Previously, the market generally expected “optical advances while copper recedes.”

According to Guotai Haitong Securities’ earlier forecast, as the VeraRubin platform officially enters mass production at CES 2026, this GTC is likely to unveil an enhanced version of the architecture—Rubin Ultra. A Rubin Ultra cabinet will integrate 144 GPUs, building a scale-up network of up to 1.5PB/s, with bidirectional interconnect bandwidth per chip reaching 10.8TB/s. To achieve such high-density interconnection, Rubin may adopt a dual-layer network topology and implement “optical in, copper out” inside the cabinet.

However, NVIDIA’s actual solution indicates that optical and copper are not mutually exclusive. Market analysis suggests that this GTC further confirms that “systems will not rely solely on one route,” with copper and optical connections combined based on distance, power consumption, cost, and delivery certainty. Copper cables remain a key option for short-distance interconnects.

Tianfeng Securities points out that copper and optical interconnects are not entirely opposed but complementary. In future AI clusters, both are expected to coexist long-term. Within racks (Scale-Up), interconnection via NPC, CPC, and Cabletray leverages copper’s high bandwidth density, low cost, and low latency; between racks (Scale-Out), CPO/NPO and pluggable optical modules address long-distance transmission issues.

(Disclaimer: The content of this article is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Investors operate at their own risk.)