LightCounting称OFC 2026显示AI互连正向CPO/NPO开放标准化推进

Roy Rubenstein, Carol Cao, Stelyana Baleva, Daryl Inniss, Bob Wheeler, Erik Kreifeldt, Igor Lomtev, and Vlad Kozlov
March 26, 2026
AI’s relentless need to scale dominated the latest record-breaking OFC show. It was a key topic at the OFC’s Plenary talks while ‘scale-as-a-prefix’—scale-up, scale-out, scale-across, and even scale-in—were a constant refrain. As Coherent’s CTO Julie Eng said in her Plenary talk, Optics is now inside the machine. The massive interest in AI was also evident on OFC’s first day, during the short courses and workshops. The optics for AI workshops were so full, overflow rooms were needed. This was not the case for OFC’s telecom-related sessions.
OFC 2026 also witnessed an unprecedented number of multi-source agreement (MSA) announcements. The OIF does a fantastic job driving and specifying key electrical and photonic technologies needed for AI. But the wave of announced MSAs represents something new: a recognition by companies of the need to funnel the industry’s technological creativity and bring more order, to ensure commonality and interoperability when scaling AI.
Andy Bechtolsheim of Arista was a dominant presence at OFC 2026, appearing in numerous panel discussions and promoting the new XPO MSA. He summed up the state of the industry as “Nvidia on one side and everyone else on the other.” Nvidia is racing ahead with co-packaged optics (CPO) on its latest Ethernet and InfiniBand switches in production now. The company also disclosed plans for CPO on NVLink switches for scale-up on Rubin-Ultra and Feynman systems. The rest of the industry is also putting more development effort into CPO and Near-Packaged Optics (NPO) developments, but it continues to innovate on pluggable transceivers, the workhorse of networks in AI clusters and many other applications.
Two new MSAs for CPO/NPO were announced at the show: the Open Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement (OCI MSA), and the Open CPX MSA. Founding members of the OCI MSA include AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI. One objective of the MSA is to provide clear, unified architectural guidance to transition the industry to low-power optical SerDes, delivering the latency, bandwidth, and energy efficiency required for next-generation AI, including multi-rack scale-up systems. Broadcom’s Near Margalit, who has overseen the company’s three generations of CPO designs, argues the OCI MSA is the most important thing he’s done in his time at Broadcom, if not in his career.
The CPX MSA is based on the pluggable approach pioneered by Nubis, now part of Ciena. The approach can be used for mixed media connectivity, supporting copper and optical interconnects via a common Co-Packaged Copper (CPC) connector developed by Samtec. Current implementation of CPX offers 6.4T of bandwidth using 200G/ lane connections, but it is designed with 400G per lane connectivity in mind. Keren Liu of Ciena commented that CPX MSA defines the form factor, but it is open to multiple implementations for the optics. Vipul Bhatt of Coherent mentioned that CPX form factor can accommodate the optical solution proposed by the OCI MSA and he sees the two MSAs as complementary to each other. Near Margalit of Broadcom did not agree with this point of view.
Both MSAs received solid industry support at OFC, including in discussions at Optica’s Executive Forum event. Gregg Bartlett, CTO of GlobalFoundries, called it “a great move away from the wild west [of CPO/NPO solutions].” Julie Eng, CTO of Coherent, expects to see “many forms of CPO, just like transceivers.” MSAs were critical to the success of the optical transceiver industry.
Lightmatter launched a new initiative within the Open Compute Project (OCP) to develop open specifications and a shared reference architecture for CPO.
NPO is also seeing a resurgence of activity. Large cloud companies are weary of proprietary CPO solutions, and they may deploy NPO solutions first, since there are more NPO suppliers. Brad Booth, who when at Microsoft headed the Consortium of On-Board Optics (COBO) initiative, an earlier era of NPO that ultimately failed, puts the resurgence down to pragmatism as companies expand their options between the current complexities of CPO and pluggable serviceability. COBO was a photonics initiative ahead of its time.
LightCounting’s Research Note does not claim to list all the important announcements at the show, nor does it feature all LightCounting team’s observations from the show. LightCounting’s upcoming reports will include analysis from various parts of the show.
Full text (27 pages) of this research note is available to LightCounting’s subscribers at: https://www.lightcounting.com/login