The NPO Standards Industry Summit, co-hosted by IPEC and OIF, concluded in Shenzhen with a consensus on international standards for near-packaged optics (NPO). The agreement, reached among leading global technology firms, lays the groundwork for the industry upgrade and large-scale commercial use of NPO, a technology positioned to address the escalating power and scalability challenges of SuperPoDs—massive computing clusters that underpin advanced AI and cloud services.
The summit, reported via Media OutReach Newswire, drew participation from experts at OIF, CAICT, Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Huawei, Broadcom, SENKO, Amphenol, and Yamaichi. Discussions centered on NPO evolution, ecosystem upgrade, and industry chain collaboration. The resulting consensus is significant because it aligns stakeholders on technical specifications, reducing fragmentation that could delay deployment. Without common standards, vendors risk developing incompatible solutions, slowing adoption and increasing costs.
Dr. Zhao Wenyu, Vice Chairman of IPEC and Deputy Director of the Technology and Standards Research Institute of CAICT, explained the urgency: “As SuperPoDs continue to expand in scale, traditional optical modules are consuming huge amounts of energy, and co-packaged optics (CPO) faces constraints like a closed industry chain and complex operations and maintenance.” He noted that NPO offers excellent energy efficiency, a favorable trade-off in port density, and strong compatibility with existing pluggable ecosystems, making it the preferred near-term solution for SuperPoD interconnect. He called for collaboration across industry, academia, research institutions, and user groups to develop NPO standards and drive the ecosystem from “usable” to “easy-to-use at scale.”
Industry leaders underscored the technical momentum. Jiang Zhibin, Optical Network Architect at Tencent, highlighted that as SuperPoDs scale and SerDes data rates increase, optical interconnect will advance rapidly toward 6.4T NPO, necessitating opto-electronic collaborative design to overcome advanced packaging challenges. Dr. Man Jiangwei, Director of Huawei’s Advanced Opto-Electronics Laboratory, revealed that Huawei has launched the industry’s first high-bandwidth 7.2T NPO product and demonstrated dynamic transmission at the IPEC exhibition booth. He stated the product achieves “high bandwidth, high reliability, and high availability” while delivering “low latency, low power consumption, and low cost” through built-in light sources and highly-integrated SiPh chips.
At the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE), the IPEC booth showcased the latest achievements of the global NPO industry chain, including high-density connector solutions from US and Japanese vendors, NPO modules of various capacities from multiple Chinese vendors, and several NPO switches. This joint exhibition demonstrated a high level of commercial maturity and strengthened industry confidence in building an open and prosperous NPO ecosystem.
The implications of this summit extend beyond technical milestones. By securing a consensus on international standards, IPEC and its partners have streamlined collaboration between standards organizations and the industry chain. This coordination is expected to lower barriers to entry, foster competition, and accelerate innovation. For operators of large-scale data centers, standardized NPO means more predictable performance, easier integration, and reduced total cost of ownership. The commitment from major global players also signals that NPO is not a niche experiment but a mainstream direction for next-generation optical interconnects. As SuperPoDs grow in size and complexity, the ability to deploy energy-efficient, high-density optical solutions at scale will be a competitive differentiator. The Shenzhen summit has thus set the stage for NPO to move from proprietary implementations to a robust international standards ecosystem, paving the way for widespread commercial deployment in the coming years.
