A consortium of major tech companies, including AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, has formed the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group. Their goal is to develop an open, universal optical interconnect standard for linking components within AI clusters and server racks, moving beyond traditional copper cables.
The new specification aims to create a common optical physical layer that supports different companies' proprietary protocols, like NVLink and UALink, over the same fiber infrastructure. It plans to start at 200 Gb/s per direction and scale up to 3.2 Tb/s, using pluggable and co-packaged optics to improve speed, power efficiency, and system integration for future AI hardware.
This initiative is primarily driven by hyperscale cloud companies to ensure flexibility and reduce development risks, rather than being a traditional vendor-led standards body. The collaboration seeks to foster a multi-vendor ecosystem for optical scale-up interconnects, which are becoming necessary as AI clusters grow in size and complexity.
Main Topics: Industry consortium formation, optical interconnect standard for AI, technical specifications and roadmap, benefits for hyperscalers and system integration.