Tech titans team up to form optical interconnect alliance to solve the AI buildout’s big data bottleneck — Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom & more set sights on building PHY to break through the limitations of copper

This week, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft announced plans to standardize a protocol-agnostic, scale-up interconnect for AI data centers. The Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement (OCI MSA) group is tasked with defining an open connectivity specification for optical interconnections in AI data centers. This would allow for higher domain scale-up sizes, and enable a multi-vendor supply chain for optical interconnects, which the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout demands.

The group’s primary goal is to enable data centers to scale by using optical interconnections rather than relying solely on copper, which is currently hitting its physical limits for optimal data transfer speeds and power consumption. Copper is also facing significant supply chain constraints, and an industry-wide shift to optical interconnections would alleviate some of this demand. An optical interconnection would also bolster data transfer speeds, crucial for large-scale AI…