OCI MSA

Overview

The OCI MSA (Optical Compute Interface Multi-Source Agreement) is an open specification for optical scale-up interconnects, co-founded on March 12, 2026 by AMD, Microsoft, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Meta, and OpenAI. It represents the first industry-wide alignment document for moving AI scale-up connectivity from in-rack electrical links to multi-rack and multi-row optical connectivity, addressing the bandwidth and reach requirements of next-generation GPU pod architectures.

The OCI MSA is built on the OIF COI (Compute Optical Interfaces) whitepaper and fills a critical standards gap: as Co-Packaged Optics and silicon photonics mature, the lack of a common interface specification prevented multi-vendor optical scale-up deployments. Gen 1 targets NRZ, WDM, and BiDi architectures. OCP has been called to own the complementary integration layers — rack and pod-level fiber shuffles, connectors, and server/switch platform integration — that fall outside OCI MSA scope.