Removing the Bottleneck: Building Scalable Infrastructure for the Generative AI Era

Author: Matt Roman, Sr. Director, Product & Technical Marketing, Celestica Collection: 2026-OCP-EMEA-Summit-Executive-Sessions

Summary

Matt Roman from Celestica presented the company's 100-terabit switching portfolio and its role in enabling the next generation of GPU cluster networking. The core technical argument is that 100T switch ASICs (specifically Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 at 102T) enable a reduction from three-tier to two-tier network architectures, supporting up to 512 GPUs in a single-stage non-blocking fabric at 200 GbE — eliminating switch hops, reducing latency, reducing failure-prone pluggable optics count, and lowering overall power consumption. This architectural simplification is presented as the fundamental "bottleneck removal" referenced in the session title.

Celestica introduced two commercial products: the DS6000 (3RU air-cooled, OSFP interfaces, powered by Tomahawk 6) and the DS6001 (2RU ORV3 form factor, hybrid liquid cooling with cold plates for the switch ASIC and front-panel optical interfaces). Both are in initial shipments. The DS6001 is Celestica's first liquid-cooled branded product. The company also disclosed $12.39 billion in 2025 revenue, 40+ locations in 16 countries, 27,000+ employees, and 100+ customers. Celestica has OCP Platinum member status and has contributed multiple switch designs to the OCP marketplace.

A reference architecture for AI training and inferencing was jointly developed with Hedgehog and published on the OCP website the day before the presentation, providing a detailed recipe for building an AI pod with networking and accelerated compute at specific configuration levels. Additional challenges discussed include 224 Gbps SerDes signal integrity for 64 × 1.6T front-panel interfaces, the transition from 800G to 1.6T optical connectivity, co-packaged and near-packaged optics as emerging options for the 1.6T-to-3.2T transition, and the rapid GPU silicon cadence (Nvidia and AMD on annual cycles) driving continuous ecosystem refresh.