Ian Redpath, Omdia's Research Director for Optical Networks, said at a CIOE 2026 forum that the global optical network market has entered an AI infrastructure supercycle, with market size reaching a 25-year high. He analyzed new players such as NeoClouds and Nvidia, noted that Nvidia's distributed training experiments are driving the rise of the Scale Across concept, and outlined multiple technology innovation trends including multi-layer multi-vendor integration, multi-rail line systems, OCS, liquid cooling, and 2nm coherent DSPs.
At a CIOE forum, Alibaba Cloud optical networking expert Yin Yanlong delivered a keynote on high-speed high-density optical interconnect trends, sharing Alibaba Cloud's practices in silicon photonics, Scale Up optical networks, and NPO, and revealing that self-developed 400G/800G/1.6T silicon photonics chips have entered batch deployment.