Research Note

Abstract

by Bob Wheeler, Carol Cao and Vlad Kozlov

August 21, 2025

It was the first time for Open Compute Project (OCP) to host a conference in Taipei and it was a great success. The event was sold out with more than 1,500 people in attendance on August 5^th and 6^th. The chiplet economy is essential for Taiwan and it is a key area for the OCP community.

A one-day OCP Technology Summit, held in Beijing on August 7^th, attracted more than 3,000 registrants and featured speakers from Alibaba, ByteDance, Baidu and Chinese telecom operators. OCP also held a one-day event in Seoul during the same week, but LightCounting was not able to attend it.

Figure 1 illustrates the Open Compute Project’s history since it was launched in 2011. The organization expects to see close to 10,000 attendees at the OCP Global summit in the U.S. in early October, but attendance at the smaller regional events exceeded all expectations this year.

OCP added sessions on optical interconnects to their events 5 years ago and launched a future technology initiative to foster innovation in this area. A recently announced partnership between the Open Compute Project (OCP) and the Innovative Optical and Wireless Networks (IOWN) Global Forum extends the optical connectivity discussions to metro and long-haul networks interconnecting data centers and end users.

IOWN was launched by NTT, Intel and Sony in 2020, and the organization is over 160 members strong now. NTT had a noticeable presence at the event with numerous presentations and demos at the exhibit, including a pluggable CPO demo of a Tomahawk 6 switch.

TSMC gave a keynote presentation on Co-packaged optics (CPO), and the topic was covered in two breakout sessions on advanced packaging technology. CPO is part of the new chiplet ecosystem. According to one of our clients: “the whole island (of Taiwan) is working on CPO now,” with TSMC being the center of activity.

One of the most entertaining panel discussions at the conference in Taipei was on scale-up networking with Ram Velaga of Broadcom and Kurtis Bowman of AMD. Ram has not given any chance to UALink and referred to NVLink Fusion as “a fox guarding a hen house,” continuing on the animal analogies, Broadcom is a gorilla in the land of Ethernet switches and it has an eye on Scale-Up Ethernet (SUE). Tomahawk Ultra, launched by Broadcom last month, is the official entry for SUE from the company. We expect to see a version of T-Ultra with CPO early next year, if not sooner.

Cliff Grossner, Chief Innovation Officer at OCP, opened the event with a message that “ideas must be polished.” We are clearly in the very early stages of the polishing of ideas for scale-up networking. A lot of sparks are flying from the current heated discussions, but we will get there eventually.

The market will resolve the arguments between Ram and Kurtis and between SUE, UALink and NVLink Fusion by the end of this decade. In the meantime, all the parties will fight for their lives. It is a major opportunity for the switch suppliers, as outlined in our report on scale-up switches: “Ethernet, InfiniBand and Optical switches for Cloud Data Centers – April 2025”.

Super nodes, enabled by scale-up networks, were the key topic for several presentations at the OCP summit in Beijing. Speakers from Alibaba, ByteDance, China Mobile and Tencent were in agreement on the benefits of interconnecting hundreds of GPUs into a single system, such as NVL72 of Nvidia and Cloud Matrix 384 of Huawei. It seems that many of the end users plan to develop such systems internally rather than (or in addition to) using products from Huawei and Nvidia.

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