SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group today announced its formation, led by founding members AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI. This industry consortium marks a pivotal shift toward a hyperscaler-driven open ecosystem to enable the development of a multi-vendor supply chain for optical scale-up interconnects. By aligning on an open specification, the OCI MSA members are promoting a robust optical ecosystem which will ensure that the future of AI interconnects is built with a flexible, multi-vendor foundation to meet the optical interconnect needs of modern AI infrastructure.

The Physics and Power Mandate

As large language models (LLMs) advance toward super intelligence, traditional copper-based connectivity is reaching limitations in physical reach which are impacting AI cluster scale-up domain architectures. OCI will enable migration from copper-based to optical-based scale-up architectures, alleviating copper interconnect bottlenecks.

The OCI specification, which is available at www.oci-msa.org, is architected to be power, latency and cost optimized. It combines non-return to zero (NRZ) modulation and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical technology and shifts the connectivity paradigm from a module-centric to a silicon-centric model. By enabling tighter integration of optics with compute and networking silicon, OCI unlocks meaningful gains in bandwidth density and system scalability while meeting the aggressive power targets of legacy copper-based connectivity.

State-of-the-Art Compute Meets State-of-the-Art Optics

By establishing an interoperable optical interface protocol, the OCI MSA enables a "plug-and-play" ecosystem. The open and interoperable specification enables hyperscalers to disaggregate any top-tier processor unit (XPU) engines and top-tier scale-up switches through a common optical physical layer (PHY), ensuring that best-in-class compute meets state-of-the-art optics.

A standardized roadmap dramatically reduces integration risk, shortens development cycles and will provide the full AI rack supply chain with a clear, de-risked path for multi-generational, multi-vendor optical interconnect deployments.

A Unified Technical Roadmap

The OCI MSA provides a scalable open specification roadmap for the full AI rack supply chain, enabling multi-vendor optical PHY and interconnect deployments across several generations of hardware:

• Standardized High-Density Interfaces: Promoting the OCI GEN1 4λ x 50Gbps NRZ (200Gbps/direction) and the OCI GEN2 400Gbps/direction bidirectional (BiDi) technology, achieving up to 800Gbps per fiber.
• Massive Scalability: A roadmap scaling wavelength counts and data rates to reach 3.2Tbps per fiber and beyond. Enabling scale-up domains to be realized with both higher GPU counts and higher bandwidth per GPU.
• Interoperable Form Factors: Support for pluggable, on-board, and co-packaged optics (CPO).
• Efficiency at Scale: Enabling optical solutions to meet the aggressive performance, power and cost targets previously only associated with copper connectivity while providing significantly greater reach.

Executive Perspectives

Brian Amick, Senior Vice President, Technology & Engineering at AMD: “The growing need for optical scale-up interconnect to support large AI systems later this decade is clear. AMD is a founding member and strong supporter of the OCI MSA as it establishes an open specification for the industry to foster a robust, multi-vendor optical scale-up interconnect ecosystem.”

Near Margalit, Vice President & General Manager, Optical Systems Division at Broadcom:"Broadcom is proud to draw upon our multi-generational CPO platform and industry partnerships to drive the OCI specification forward. The OCI-MSA allows for seamless integration with existing electrical SerDes-based ASICs while providing a clear path to direct ASIC integration, ensuring the ecosystem remains flexible and high-performing."

Dan Rabinovitsj, Vice President of Hardware Systems at Meta: "The appetite for technology to address the power and cost constraints impacting AI cluster design is real and imminent. We encourage adoption of this OCI protocol to decouple the need for larger scale-up domains from the limitations of electrical backplanes in high performance AI clusters.”

Saurabh Dighe, Corporate Vice President, Azure Systems and Architecture at Microsoft: “Scale up focused optical technologies, protocols, and switch architectures are foundational to building scalable, multi rack, high performance AI compute domains. The OCI MSA advances this vision with a forward-looking physical layer specification setting the stage for open standards, differentiated implementations and systems architecture innovation.”

Gilad Shainer, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA: “NVIDIA is a founding member of the OCI MSA to establish a common optical standard across global AI infrastructures. By equipping best-in-class compute with state-of-the-art optics, the OCI MSA can deliver the scale and performance required by the next era of super-intelligence.”

Richard Ho, Head of Hardware at OpenAI: “The continued improvement of artificial intelligence relies on scaling of AI supercomputers with more petaflops, more memory bandwidth and, importantly, more network bandwidth across larger domains requiring further reach. The OCI MSA will be critical to allow the industry to build the AI systems that will get us to AGI.”

For more information about the OCI MSA, please visit: www.oci-msa.org