Vivek Raghuraman
CEO, Mixx Technologies
Optics took the main stage
By the second morning of OCP in San Jose, I had lost count of how many conversations circled back to light. Talks that opened on power, cooling or switch silicon all landed in the same place: moving more bits through optics, closer to the chip. Dell’Oro’s Sameh Boujelbene counted nearly twice as many optics sessions at this year’s OCP Global Summit as last year, and the hallway conversations carried the same energy.
For a company built around optical interconnect, it was an energizing four days. Here is what stood out to me, and why I believe it confirms the path we have chosen at Mixx.
Meta brings light to the backplane and Copper’s countdown to zero begins.
The moment I keep returning to is Meta’s optical backplane prototype on its booth floor. In his keynote, Santosh Janardhan framed the problem with refreshing clarity: inside the rack, more bandwidth now means more copper than the rack can physically hold. Meta’s answer keeps the same rack, the same serviceability and the same cooling, and aims for an order-of-magnitude step up in bandwidth by carrying the backplane on light.
Two things about this impressed me. First, the design brief. By making the existing rack the constraint, Meta told every supplier exactly how optics will enter scale-up: as an evolution operators can install and service the way they work today. Second, the candor on timing. In a separate session, Meta’s sourcing team said its optical options are still maturing toward a full copper backplane replacement, so it will pilot near-packaged optics in scale-out first, where pluggables give it a fallback.
Meta had company. Credo and SENKO showed a blind-mate optical backplane for scale-up, built on micro-emitter near-packaged optics, with up to 10x the bandwidth of current copper backplanes. When independent teams arrive at the same architecture in the same week, a market is forming.
Four more signals worth watching
Power comes down to counting SerDes. Meta’s Nan Ge offered the simplest framework I heard all week: count the SerDes along a link and you can rank its power. Retimed pluggables carry two sets, LPO, NPO and CPO carry one, and integrated optics through OCI removes them entirely. Meta calls that last step its north star. With roughly six transceivers per GPU and Meta expecting industry demand above 100 million units next year, every watt saved multiplies fast.
Open standards unlock multi-sourcing. The same talk made a point I want every optics team to hear. Pluggables scale because standards define the boundary conditions, and near-packaged optics needs that same foundation so buyers can source from several suppliers. Meta’s remarks read as a clear buyer-side endorsement of open specifications like Open CPX.
CPO is shipping, and scale-up is crossing racks. Broadcom cited 225 million hours of Meta operation on its Tomahawk 5 CPO platform. NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Photonics switches are in production, and Celestica showed a 102.4T CPO switch with field-replaceable lasers. Microsoft described a Maia 300 scale-up domain linking 12,288 accelerators across 128 racks, with optics carrying the links between racks.
Reliability is the new performance metric. Meta noted that the slowest node sets the pace for a whole cluster, and MultiLane reminded the room that one faulty connection can hold an entire system at the dock. Standardized transceiver telemetry through the OCP Optics Reliability workstream drew real attention. Operators now judge optics on uptime as much as on speed.
Why this resonates with what we are building at Mixx
Each of these threads maps to a layer of our 5DS Platform, and that is by design. We founded Mixx on a simple belief: AI data centers need full-stack optical connectivity that fits the infrastructure operators already run.
SxC™ for the optical backplane. Meta’s brief of same rack, same serviceability and same cooling describes the exact problem our SxC™ connector was built to solve: dense, serviceable fiber connectivity designed for real racks. We launched SxC™ with a live demo at SEMICON Taiwan in September, and OCP showed us the demand arriving.
HBxIO™ for the power equation. Our HBxIO™ optical engine brings optics close to the silicon, placing it on the efficient side of the power ladder Meta laid out, with fewer conversions per link and more bandwidth per watt.
Open CPX for multi-sourcing. As a contributing member of the Open CPX MSA, we share the conviction Meta voiced on stage: open boundary conditions turn optical engines into components buyers can source with confidence.
STxIQ™ for reliability at scale. Our STxIQ™ software platform gives operators visibility into the health of every optical link, right where the industry conversation on telemetry and uptime is heading.
The road from here
OCP 2026 showed an industry aligned on the destination: light, carried closer to the silicon and deeper into the rack, on open standards. The conversation now turns to qualification, serviceability and volume, and that makes the next twelve months the most exciting stretch our field has seen.
We will keep building on that momentum through the Open CPX MSA and on the road to OFC 2027. If you are working on optical backplanes, scale-up optics or link reliability, I would love to compare notes. Reach out to our team, and let’s build the optical future of AI infrastructure together.
Sources
- Meta Engineering: OCP Summit 2026 networking announcements
- Simple Tech Trend: Meta keynote and optical backplane prototype
- Simple Tech Trend: Meta, Beyond Pluggables and the NPO ecosystem
- Dell’Oro Group: Optics takes center stage at OCP 2026
- Credo: OCP 2026 showcase including the optical backplane
- NextGenInfra: OCP Global Summit 2026 interviews
