Nvidia and SPIL plan to expand optical engine capacity in Taiwan

Nvidia and SPIL plan to expand optical engine capacity in Taiwan. What Nvidia and SPIL are building The planned expansion centers on optical engines, the components that turn electrical signals into light so data can travel between chips and switches. SPIL’s role in Nvidia’s supply chain covers chip-scale packaging and testing. This sits within Nvidia’s broader co-packaged optics (CPO) push. CPO places optical engines directly onto switch silicon rather than relying on separate, pluggable optical transceivers. TSMC is also part of the picture. It handles silicon photonics fabrication through its COUPE platform, giving Nvidia two major Taiwanese partners covering different stages of production. The numbers behind Spectrum-X Photonics The product driving demand is Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics switch platform. Nvidia began shipping select Spectrum-X CPO switches in June 2026. By mid-August 2026, the company declared full production. In larger configurations such as the SN6800, the platform reaches throughput of up to 409.6 Tb/s. Nvidia’s CPO approach reportedly delivers a 5x improvement in power efficiency compared to traditional optical modules. It also uses 4x fewer lasers...