Live Webinar, 30 September: Optical Networking Trends for AI Data Centres

The AI networking landscape is being remade. GPU clusters are scaling to 100,000+ units. Bandwidth demands are exploding. Power budgets are tightening. And the industry is scrambling to figure out which technologies actually work, and which are still promises on a roadmap.

To cut through the hype, we surveyed the optical communications professionals building and operating AI infrastructure today. From data centre operators to module vendors, network architects to infrastructure planners, they shared their real experience with CPO, pluggables, coherent optics, optical switching and emerging fibre technologies.

The results? Revealing. They show what's actually being deployed across scale-up, scale-out, scale-across and DCI scenarios, the barriers blocking emerging technologies, the strategic trade-offs organisations are making, and the pain points teams face daily.

In this webinar, we bring together industry experts to discuss what the Fibre Systems community told us, and what it means for the future of optical networking in the AI era.

Who should join this webinar?

This webinar is tailored for technical leaders, network strategists, and engineering decision-makers responsible for evaluating, designing, or deploying optical infrastructure for AI workloads. For example:

• Network & Systems Architects: Professionals designing scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across network topologies to handle massive GPU cluster bandwidth.
• Data Centre Operators & Infrastructure Planners: Engineers and managers focused on power efficiency, thermal management, density, and physical layer scaling.
• Optical Communications Engineers & Technical Leads: Specialists evaluating key technology choices, such as co-packaged optics (CPO), linear-drive pluggables (LPO), pluggable transceivers, and optical circuit switching (OCS).
• Product Managers & Business Development Leaders: Professionals at module vendors, component suppliers, and system integrators needing market intelligence on real-world adoption rates and customer pain points.
• Hardware & Systems Engineers: Technical leads assessing next-generation physical media, including hollow-core fibre, multicore fibre, and coherent optics.

What You'll Learn

✓ What technologies are actually deployed today for AI infrastructure, and what's still experimental

✓ How organisations are approaching the CPO versus pluggables decision

✓ Real adoption barriers for emerging technologies: CPO, LPO, NPO, OCS

✓ Strategic trade-offs: best-of-breed flexibility versus optimised integration

✓ Pain points across scale-up, scale-out, scale-across and DCI deployments

✓ How the industry is evaluating hollow-core fibre, multicore fibre and next-generation optical solutions

✓ What's blocking deployment of emerging technologies, and what would accelerate adoption

✓ Industry trends shaping optical networking decisions for the next 3-5 years