Workshop: Optical Boundaries in AI Clusters: Synergy or Independence for CPO and OCS?

As AI clusters scale toward 100k+ accelerators, two optical technologies are reshaping the interconnect debate and are frequently discussed together. Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) targets the device layer, reducing interconnect power and increasing bandwidth density. Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) targets the network layer, enabling sparing capabilities and reconfigurable topologies.

Each is advancing rapidly on its own, and existing OCS deployments at hyperscale have historically paired with pluggable optics rather than CPO. This raises a fundamental architectural question: do CPO and OCS actually reinforce one another when deployed in the same network, or are they independent bets that happen to share the "AI optics" spotlight?

This workshop convenes device, system, and hyperscale-operator perspectives to facilitate an honest debate on whether co-designing CPO and OCS delivers real, compounding benefits. We will examine the core question of whether CPO-based networks are delaying, complementing, or actively competing with OCS deployments, and where their technical and operational paths genuinely intersect.

Key questions include:

• Fundamental Value Proposition: Is there a compelling architectural case for deploying CPO and OCS together in the same fabric, or does each deliver its primary value independently?
• Synergy vs. Competition: Do CPO and OCS meaningfully complement one another, or do they create competing requirements, e.g., link budget, power consumption, TCO, etc.?
• Physical Budget Offsets: Does CPO buy back the critical end-to-end link budget required to deploy OCS at large scale?
• Operational Insulation: Can the dynamic topology reconfiguration, logically flexible routing, and sparing capabilities of OCS fabrics effectively insulate operators from the serviceability, blast-radius, and downtime risks typically tied to CPO?
• System Complexity & TCO: Does the end-to-end TCO and power efficiency of combining both technologies compound their individual benefits, or does it hit diminishing returns when compared against a baseline of OCS with pluggables?
• Roadmap & Lifecycle Alignment: Given their distinct ecosystem maturities, generational lifecycles, and standardization timelines, should system architects plan CPO and OCS as a single, co-designed ecosystem or as loosely coupled, independent decisions?
• Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Applicability: How does the synergy vs. independence debate evolve when zooming in on scale-up vs. scale-out networks?