A new industry consortium has formed to create an open specification for AI infrastructure, addressing the growing limitations of copper-based connectivity in large-scale AI systems. AMD, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI have established the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group to develop standardized optical scale-up interconnects.

As large language models advance toward super intelligence, traditional copper-based connectivity is reaching physical reach limitations that impact AI cluster scale-up domain architectures. The OCI specification, available at www.oci-msa.org, combines non-return to zero (NRZ) modulation and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical technology to shift from module-centric to silicon-centric connectivity models. This enables tighter integration of optics with compute and networking silicon, unlocking gains in bandwidth density and system scalability.

The OCI MSA provides a scalable roadmap featuring standardized high-density interfaces like the OCI GEN1 4λ x 50 Gbps NRZ (200 Gbps/direction) and OCI GEN2 400 Gbps/direction bidirectional technology. The specification supports pluggable, on-board, and co-packaged optics (CPO) form factors while targeting the aggressive performance, power, and cost requirements previously only achievable with copper connectivity.