Takeaways on NPO from 2026 OCP Global Summit

On Day 2 of the 2026 OCP Global Summit, an IPEC optical interconnect workshop focused on discussions around NPO. Industry participants such as Source Photonics, Lightcounting, Alibaba, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Ciena, Ligent, Genuine Optics, Lumentum, Lumilens, NVIDIA and Huawei presented their views on NPO. The industry has formed the view connectivity, rather than compute alone, is becoming the primary bottleneck. Near-packaged optics (NPO) move optical conversion closer to compute, targeting better signal integrity, bandwidth, and energy efficiency. OpenCPX explicitly targets common mechanical, electrical, optical, thermal, and management interfaces across suppliers, providing the ecosystem with a shared implementation framework rather than only a broad architectural vision. However, we also observed debate over whether pluggable NPO offers materially better flexibility and serviceability than CPO. Key concern on CPO is that optical failure could result in scrapping an entire ASIC as