NVL72 rack packs 2+ miles of copper — analyst says the copper-to-fiber inflection is near
BenBajarin · x · 2026-09-19
Ben Bajarin points to his March report "Copper to Fiber: The Connectivity Inflection in AI Infrastructure," arguing NPO (network processing optics) will ramp hard first and that this is becoming consensus.
Key data: a single NVIDIA NVL72 rack carries over 2 miles of copper across 5,000 cable runs, 3,000 lbs of cable and 100+ lbs of steel reinforcement. Selling 60,000 NVL72 racks would mean 120,000+ miles of copper — nearly five laps around Earth. Next-gen training requires rack-to-rack distances where copper physically can't carry signals fast enough, and NVIDIA's roadmap has a generation where scale-up goes optical. Network saturation is already wasting GPU time worth billions of dollars; the debate is only about timing.
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