Micas Networks is expanding its company-operated manufacturing in Malaysia to increase production capacity for a new generation of high-speed network switches built for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

At the center of the expansion is CPO (Co-Packaged Optics), a networking design that moves optical engines much closer to the switch ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). Traditional Ethernet switches commonly use removable optical transceivers at the front of the chassis and carry high-speed electrical signals across the circuit board. CPO shortens that electrical path by integrating optics alongside the switching silicon, an approach intended to reduce the power and signal-integrity penalties that become increasingly difficult at very high bandwidths.

According to Micas Networks, its Malaysia expansion adds clean-room manufacturing, optical integration, advanced system assembly, and automated testing and validation for complex Ethernet platforms used in AI data centers.

A 51.2 Tbps switch moves into volume production

Micas’ current commercial CPO system is the M2-W6940-128X1-FR4, a 51.2 Tbps Ethernet switch based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 5 Bailly platform. It provides 128 ports of 400G FR4 connectivity and is available through Supermicro as part of validated AI infrastructure configurations.

The manufacturing expansion matters because advanced optical systems have to move beyond prototypes if CPO is going to become normal data center infrastructure. Micas says company-operated production gives it direct control over clean-room optical assembly, quality, new-product introduction, supply chain execution and delivery.

Micas reports lower switch power in a validated configuration

Micas has also published results from a validated configuration combining Supermicro servers, AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI network interface cards and its CPO switching platform.

In that specific configuration, Micas reported approximately 38.28% lower switch power consumption compared with the pluggable-optics setup used in its test. That figure should not be treated as a universal CPO efficiency number: it is a company-reported result for the particular validated architecture tested.

Power consumed by networking becomes increasingly important as accelerator clusters scale. Every watt used by switching, optics and data center cooling competes with the power budget available for compute. CPO is one of several technologies being developed to keep interconnect bandwidth growing without allowing network power requirements to rise at the same rate.

Why the factory expansion matters

The larger story is manufacturing maturity. CPO has been demonstrated for years, but deploying it broadly requires repeatable optical assembly, testing, serviceability and supply-chain execution. Micas says its expanded Malaysia operation is designed to move these systems from engineering and validation into commercial production while its San Jose headquarters continues product strategy and ecosystem work.

Micas’ broader portfolio spans open networking systems from 1G through 800G and supports SONiC, an open-source network operating system. The company’s push into commercial CPO adds another option for operators trying to balance bandwidth, latency and energy consumption as AI clusters continue to grow.