Broadcom ships Tomahawk 6 Davisson, a 102.4T switch with CPO

On 12 October 2025 Broadcom said it was shipping Tomahawk 6 Davisson (BCM78919), the co-packaged optics version of its 102.4 Tbps switch chip. The electrical versions of Tomahawk 6 had been shipping since June 2025, when Broadcom described the device as the first single chip with 102.4 Tbps of Ethernet switching capacity, available with either 100G or 200G PAM4 SerDes and configurable as 512 ports of 200G or 1,024 ports of 100G.

Davisson replaces front-panel pluggable cages with sixteen 6.4 Tbps optical engines built on TSMC's COUPE process, giving 64 ports of 1.6TbE from one package. Broadcom's stated power saving is of the order of 70 per cent compared with pluggable optics, because the high-speed electrical path between the ASIC and the module cage disappears. The lasers sit in pluggable, field-replaceable modules, which addresses the most common objection to earlier CPO designs: that a failed laser meant replacing the whole switch.

Why it matters for AI fabrics

Tomahawk 6 is aimed at the back-end networks that connect GPUs and other accelerators. Broadcom positions it for scale-up and scale-out networks in AI clusters of 100,000 to one million XPUs. The chip went into OEM products quickly: HPE's QFX5250, announced on 3 December 2025, is built on Tomahawk 6, offers 102.4 Tbps for GPU-to-GPU connectivity and is described as Ultra Ethernet Transport-ready.

On 12 March 2026 Broadcom said the Tomahawk 6 family was shipping in production volume, less than nine months after first samples. The CPO variant remains a smaller part of that volume. Most 102.4T systems announced so far use pluggable 800G and 1.6T optics, and Broadcom's own March 2026 launch of Taurus, a 400G-per-lane DSP for 1.6T pluggables, shows that the company expects pluggable modules to carry the bulk of demand for some time.

What it means for buyers

For enterprises in the Gulf, Central Asia and Africa, 102.4T switches are relevant mainly to AI-cluster projects, and the practical choice is between pluggable and CPO systems from OEMs such as HPE Juniper, Cisco, Arista and the ODMs. Pluggable designs keep optics as a separately sourced line item, which eases lead-time management; CPO ties the optics to the switch order and to the OEM's service terms. When requesting quotations, specify the SerDes rate (100G or 200G), the optics type and the expected cluster size, and ask for switch and optics lead times separately, because 800G and 1.6T optics have been the constrained item through 2026. InTechnologies can quote Tomahawk 6-based systems from several OEMs together with the matching optics.