Breaking The Power Wall With Co-Packaged & Liquid Now!

Author: Chris (Micas Networks), Andrew (CEO, Micas Networks), Johnson Stab (Product Manager, Super Micro) Collection: 2025 OCP Global Summit - Expo Hall Sessions

Summary

Micas Networks and Super Micro present a joint solution addressing three critical AI data center challenges -- power, thermal management/liquid cooling, and networking scalability -- through co-packaged optics (CPO) switches with integrated liquid cooling. Current switch ASICs consume 1,500W and future generations may reach 6,000W, making liquid cooling mandatory for network switches (liquid cooling is roughly 1,000x more efficient than air). CPO eliminates thousands of pluggable transceiver modules by integrating optics directly into the ASIC package, delivering three benefits: power savings, reliability increase, and scalability.

The reliability argument is particularly compelling: traditional pluggable transceiver deployments experience 5-8% failure rates after shipping due to vibration and shock, while CPO switches tested by hyperscalers achieved over 4 million hours of operation without a single port flapping event. The laser source -- the perceived vulnerability in CPO -- is moved to the front panel for serviceability and has been proven reliable across 50+ million deployed units. Super Micro frames the partnership through "Data Center Building Block Solutions" where networking is at the heart of deployment challenges, and pre-validated, pre-configured Micas CPO switches ship integrated with Super Micro servers for single-source deployment. The 5% power savings from liquid cooling over air cooling in a gigawatt factory translates to 200,000 additional B200 GPUs worth of power capacity, with Microsoft's $1.95B investment for 100,000 GPU rentals cited as reference for the economic value.