Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) has long promised to transform datacenter connectivity, but it has taken a long time for the technology to come to market, with tangible deployment-ready products only arriving in 2025. In the meantime, pluggable transceivers have kept pace with networking requirements and remain the default path thanks to their relative cost-effectiveness, familiarity in deployment, and standards-based interoperability.However the heavy networking demands that come with AI workloads mea...