Cooperating to solve AI-related data problems to optimize the performance of AI workloads
October 13, 2025 – Today, the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), the nonprofit international organization bringing at-scale innovations and hyperscale best practices to all, and SNIA, a nonprofit global organization for technologies related to handling and optimizing data, announce a new collaboration as alliance partners to advance vendor-neutral standards and technologies for data storage within open data center hardware ecosystems. The new alliance is especially focused on tackling the storage, memory, and networking challenges of AI infrastructure.
Together, OCP and SNIA share common goals and a common approach to tackling the storage, memory, and networking challenges of AI clusters. Specifically, AI training and inference need high-bandwidth, low-latency, low-power connectivity to data accessed continually by XPU accelerators. SNIA’s Storage.AI™ was recently launched as an open standards project for efficient data services related to AI workloads. Tying together the AI-related work of SNIA technical work groups, it focuses on industry-standard, non-proprietary, and neutral approaches to solving AI-related data problems to optimize the performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of AI workloads. Similarly, the OCP Community is actively designing open, efficient, large-scale data center infrastructure, integrating the work of its breadth of projects through its Open Systems for AI strategic initiative that spans physical and IT data center infrastructure and systems management.
Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair, emphasized that, “the unprecedented demands of AI require a holistic view of the data pipeline, from storage and memory to networking and processing. No single company can solve these challenges alone. SNIA and OCP working together provide a complementary neutral alliance for data center operators like hyperscalers and neoclouds to work alongside vendors on open solutions that unlock the high-performance data services required for AI infrastructure.”
OCP and SNIA collaborate at events and share educational efforts across their communities and membership. Individuals often hold volunteer roles in both organizations, fostering direct collaboration on standards and education. OCP leadership recently presented at SNIA’s SDC 2025 in a keynote followed by an overview of Storage.AI. OCP Storage Project co-leads also presented in an SDC breakout session, covering many contributions from the Project working group, such as Data Center NVMe Device spec, Data Center SAS-SATA Device spec, the new version 1.0 of OCP L.O.C.K. and more. SNIA leadership and membership also regularly participate in OCP Summits and Community meetings to discuss advancements in storage and networking.
“SNIA is an important OCP Alliance Partner as we work together to advance openness within the storage ecosystem to meet the needs of hyperscale and AI-driven data centers, including specifications and education around NVMe SSDs, EDSFF form factors, security and future technologies like data-centric computing and computational storage,” said James Kelly, VP Market Intelligence and Innovation at the OCP Foundation.
Overall, the collaboration scenario emphasizes mutual promotion of open, interoperable technologies to optimize data center performance, reduce vendor lock-in, and support emerging needs like AI and edge computing, with OCP providing the data center and IT hardware framework and SNIA ensuring robust storage standards integration.
About the Open Compute Project Foundation
The Open Compute Project (OCP) brings at-scale innovations and hyperscaler best practices to all, spanning technology domains from the data center to the edge, and the technology stack from silicon, to systems, to site facilities and services. The international OCP Community is made up of organizations and people from hyperscale, neocloud, and cloud data center operators, communications providers, colocation providers, diverse enterprises, and technology vendors. With the tenets of openness, impact, efficiency, scale and sustainability, the OCP engages and educates thousands of engineers every year. Across many projects and initiatives the OCP Foundation and Community are meeting the market today and shaping the future. Learn more at: www.opencompute.org.
About SNIA
SNIA is a not-for-profit global organization made up of corporations, universities, startups, and individuals. The members collaborate to develop and promote vendor-neutral architectures as well as international standards and specifications. SNIA promotes technologies related to the storage, transport, optimization of infrastructure, acceleration, format, and protection of data.