Optical Communication Conference (2026 OFC): The telecom conference has become an AI conference, with the focus on "how to pack higher-density optical fibers into smaller spaces."
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The annual Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) is undergoing a transformation. Once a premier optical exhibition focused on the telecom industry, it has now fully shifted towards AI infrastructure.
This year's conference is being held in Los Angeles this week, with giants like Corning, Cisco, Arista, Nokia, and Ciena unveiling many new products, all highly focused on one key question: How to pack higher-density optical fibers into smaller physical spaces to meet the bandwidth and low-latency demands of AI data centers.
From booth layouts to product launches, AI’s presence is everywhere. Brian Rhoney, Corning's Data Center Market Development Manager, said that in the past, the company mainly demonstrated front-end network products at the conference, i.e., those connecting data centers and long-haul internet.
But now, back-end networks—connections between machines within data centers—have become equally or even more important areas of attention, Brian Rhoney said:
This year, everything seems to have an AI story.
An attending analyst said bluntly at a media roundtable:
This has already changed from a telecom show to an AI show.
Density Reigns: How Optical Fibers are "Squeezing Into" Smaller Spaces
At this year’s conference, “more” is the constant keyword: more bandwidth, higher density, smaller size.
Corning showcased a side-by-side comparison of traditional fiber cables encased in plastic tubes versus its new miniature cables (with plastic tubes removed to save space). Brian Rhoney explained:
Round structures are inefficient to stack, and in long-distance markets duct space is already limited, so packing as much fiber as possible into limited space is crucial.
Corning also highlighted its multi-core fiber technology, integrating four optical cores into a single fiber—rather than the traditional single-core design—for a leap in bandwidth capacity.
Additionally, inside the data center, Corning demonstrated high-density optical cabling solutions used for connecting servers to switch racks within server stacks.
At the switch level, Arista launched its new eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO) transceivers—a new type of pluggable optical module planned for mass production in 2027.
According to Arista, XPO modules can deliver 4x the per-rack bandwidth of currently popular OSFP solutions, while reducing switch rack footprint by 75%, and lowering data center power infrastructure, cooling, and pipe costs—potentially saving billions of dollars in AI factory construction.
The multisource agreement (MSA) supporting this solution has already received endorsements from over 40 member organizations and will be officially released at this conference.
Power and Architecture: A Dual Breakthrough for Next Generation Optical Networks
Reducing power consumption is another major theme of this conference, with many vendors touting substantial energy savings as product selling points.
Ciena showcased a new Reconfigurable Line System (RLS) with Hyper-Rail technology.
This technology eschews traditional wavelength multiplexing and instead uses “fully-filled fibers” for transmission, achieving up to a 32x density increase between clusters and data centers, while reducing per-rack power consumption by up to 75%.
Ciena said, this technology mainly targets the training networks of hyperscale cloud providers, as these customers are connecting multiple sites into distributed networks to support their ever-expanding AI models.
Ciena also unveiled the new Vesta co-packaged optics (CPO) pluggable connector, which can directly connect to switch ASIC chips, increasing link rates while lowering power consumption.
Cisco introduced the Open Transport 3000 series, claiming the new system can reduce power consumption by 75% and increase rack space utilization by 80%.
This system encapsulates multiple pairs of parallel fibers in a single line card, supporting channel extensions from local switches to other racks and data centers, aiming to help telecom operators and enterprises consolidate multi-site resources for parallel distributed processing of ever-growing AI models.
Cisco also announced an additional 800Gb/s capacity for the NCS 1014 transponder and showcased coherent pluggable optical modules based on Acacia technology.
Nokia, meanwhile, launched a modular architecture based on a new DSP and optical frontend components, covering coherent pluggable transceivers for long-haul and data center interconnection, short-range high-bandwidth optical connectors for enterprise/campus deployments, and double-sided pluggable optical modules compatible with CPO, Near-Packaged Optics (NPO), and Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO) switches.
Nokia also introduced a passive optical network (PON) out-of-band management system called Aurelis, claiming it can reduce the number of required switches in a network by 90% and lower energy consumption by 50%.
Hollow-core Fibers: From Lab to Large-scale Deployment
Hollow-core fiber is one of the hottest cutting-edge topics at this year’s conference.
Unlike traditional fiber—where light transmits through solid glass—hollow-core fiber allows light to travel through a hollow glass core, significantly reducing latency. Corning’s Brian Rhoney said:
Previously, interconnections between data centers were limited by distance, but now it’s possible to connect data centers that are farther apart.
He admits hollow-core fiber is not a new technology, but after years of continuous improvement, “it is now practical and market activity around hollow-core fiber is very high.”
Corning has already reached a cooperation agreement with Microsoft for the manufacturing of hollow-core fiber in September 2025. Reportedly, Microsoft has also signed agreements with Corning and Heraeus Covantics, aiming to build a “transnational production supply chain” to expand global deployment of next-generation optical fiber.
On the Component Level: Accelerating CPO and High-Speed Transceivers
In the optical components domain, Coherent, Lumentum, and Marvell concentrated on unveiling multiple product advances during the conference.
Coherent announced a variety of co-packaged optical technologies, including a silicon photonics–based 6.4T slot CPO with an in-house high-power InP continuous-wave laser external light source module; a high-speed VCSEL-based multimode slot CPO; and a 400G InP modulator running on silicon. Coherent’s stock rose about 1% in midday trading.
Lumentum showcased several AI and cloud data center-focused products, including a prototype 1.6T DR4 OSFP pluggable transceiver using four 400G differential EML lasers, an 800mW ultra-high-power laser, and a 16-channel DWDM ultra-high-power laser.
Lumentum’s Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Rafik Ward said:
The company’s product portfolio is designed to support the scale, speed, and efficiency required for next-generation AI and cloud data center infrastructure.
Lumentum's stock rose about 4% that day.
Marvell and Lumentum jointly demonstrated the Aquila 1.6T coherent-lite DSP, the Ara 1.6T PAM4 optical DSP, as well as an interoperability demo of COLORZ® 800 ZR/ZR+ DCI module and Lumentum R300 Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) platform.
Xi Wang, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Marvell’s Connectivity business, said:
This joint solution showcases how next-generation AI networks can achieve breakthrough advances in performance, energy efficiency, and architecture flexibility.
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