Huawei and industry partners launch OPEN NPO project to jointly build China's first near-package optics (NPO) optical interconnect MSA

Mars Finance News, the "Supernode and GW-level AIDC Technology Forum and Open AI Infra Community Semi-Annual Work Meeting," guided by the Global Computing Consortium (GCC) and hosted by the Open AI Infra Community (OAII Community), was held in Beijing. At the meeting, Huawei, together with more than 20 industry chain partners including China Mobile Research Institute, JD Cloud, Baidu, and China Electronics Standardization Institute, jointly launched the OPEN NPO project and initiated the first domestic NPO optical interconnect MSA (Multi-Source Agreement), promoting the establishment of an open and unified near-package optics standard system, accelerating next-generation high-speed optical interconnect technology innovation and industrial collaboration, and providing key support for the development of high-end computing infrastructure in the AI era.

With the rapid development of large model training, supernodes, and ultra-large-scale intelligent computing clusters, high-bandwidth, low-latency, and low-power interconnect networks are becoming an important foundation for unleashing AI computing power. Although traditional pluggable optical modules are technologically mature, they face challenges such as high power consumption and insufficient integration density in high-density computing scenarios. Near-package optics (NPO), with its advantages of ultra-low power consumption, ultra-low latency, high-density integration, and high reliability, is becoming an important technical direction for next-generation high-speed optical interconnects. However, the industry currently still faces issues such as inconsistent interface specifications, insufficient product compatibility, and low supply chain collaboration efficiency, which constrain the large-scale development of the industry. (Huawei Computing) (CLS)