I think the market is seriously underestimating $CRDO's lead in AECs.
People seem to think that just because $MXL or $MRVL can develop a 1.6T AEC chip, they can easily take market share from Credo. I don't think it's that simple.
Here's why.
Credo doesn't just sell chips. It owns the entire solution, from SerDes and cable design to firmware, system testing, qualification and delivery.
Bill Brennan once talked about Credo's testing facility in Taiwan. They have over 20 thermal chambers running real customer switches and NICs under heavy traffic.
And the goal isn't just to pass the tests. It's to deliberately break the links, find every weakness, and fix it before the customer ever sees the product.
He said this process has improved bit error rates by 100–1,000x.
Frankly, I'd love to see another AEC competitor put its entire solution through the same kind of torture test. So far, I haven't seen anyone else publicly talk about testing their links this aggressively.
And Credo has the track record to back it up. According to the company, its AECs have accumulated over 6 billion hours of real-world operation without a reported link flap.
That's not something a competitor can replicate overnight.
Just look at Meta's recent Prometheus report. It took extensive engineering work to reduce cluster interruptions by 99%. Not all those issues were related to cables, of course, but it shows how important reliability has become.
When you're running tens of thousands of expensive GPUs, saving a few dollars on a cable means nothing if an unstable link costs you hours of compute time.
That's why I think ZeroFlap is such a big deal.
Even $MXL's own CEO admitted that Credo controls roughly 93–99% of the AEC cable market.
I'm not saying competitors won't win orders. I'm sure some will, especially as the industry moves to 1.6T.
But winning a design is one thing. Getting qualified, proving reliability and delivering at scale is something else entirely.
Credo has already demonstrated its 1.6T AECs in Rubin rack configurations, while new entrants still have a lot to prove.
And let's not forget, $MRVL and others have been working on AECs for years. None of them has meaningfully challenged Credo's dominance so far.
I think competition will eventually come, but the market is underestimating how hard it is to catch up.
ZeroFlap isn't just a product feature. It's the result of years of engineering, testing and real-world deployment.