OCP Foundation Collaboration Acceleration Fund

Introduction

The OCP Foundation Acceleration Fund is designed to empower collaborative innovation across the open hardware ecosystem by supporting projects that cannot easily take shape outside of the OCP environment. Many of the most promising ideas in our community require multi-stakeholder coordination, shared infrastructure, and neutral governance, conditions uniquely enabled through the OCP Foundation.

This initiative creates a structured, transparent mechanism for the Foundation to provide community-driven projects that align with OCP’s mission yet remain underfunded or too complex for any single organization to pursue alone. Through both resource-matching (25%-50%) and programmatic or technical support, the Fund helps accelerate high-impact efforts that advance OCP Core Tenets across the data center and hardware value chain.

At its core, the Acceleration Fund represents OCP’s ongoing commitment to lowering barriers to collaboration, amplifying community innovation, and ensuring that the outcomes of these joint efforts remain openly available to the global ecosystem. By doing so, the Foundation not only strengthens its leadership position in advancing open compute technologies but also reinforces the principle that collective innovation delivers the greatest impact when supported through a trusted, neutral platform.

Nature of the Fund: The Collaboration Acceleration Fund is a non-equity, pre-competitive grant program. Unlike a venture fund or incubator, its primary objective is the creation of open standards and shared technical collateral. All funded outcomes must be contributed back to the OCP Community under OCP-approved licenses.

Submit Your Proposal Today!

Proposals should be submitted by May 15, 2026 via the form.

Any questions should be sent to [email protected].

The high-level goals of the Fund include:

Fund activities that are underfunded elsewhere due to lack of collaborative environment that can be provided by the OCP Foundation
Support Community-Driven Innovation: Fund projects advancing open data center facilities, hardware and OCP Core Tenets while ensuring community-wide accessibility to outcomes.
Encourage Collaboration: Require participation from multiple stakeholders to foster partnerships and prevent inurement.

Potential Project Areas Considered High Priority for 2026

AI Data Centers
1. Enabling Fungible Data Centers
  1. Develop and Test Data Center Roadmap and Reference Designs
  2. Data Center Facilities Power Distribution
  3. Robotic Automation for Moving Heavy Data Center Equipment and Racks
  4. Efficient Data Center and Power Grid Interconnect
  5. 1MW In-rack Power and Cooling Technologies
2. Design and Build AI Clusters
  1. AI Pod Reference Architectures and Deployment Verification
  2. Scale up and Scale out Networking
  3. AI Accelerator Foundational Design Architectures
  4. Creating Diverse Chiplet Ecosystems
3. AI Data Center Systems Management
  1. Integration of Facilities Management and Hardware Management Platforms
  2. Electrical Grid Integrations.
AI Computing Continuum
1. Architectures for AI Inference
  1. Smaller Scale AI Cluster Racks and In-rack Power and Cooling
  2. Liquid Cooling Capable Edge Data Center Facilities
2. Edge “sized” AI Clusters
  1. Smaller scale xPU designs
  2. Diverse AI Accelerator Designs for Edge Deployments
  3. Scale Across Networking
3. Systems Management
  1. Integrated Remote Management Environments
  2. Distributed Orchestration of AI Workloads
4. AI-Native Wireless Access
  1. xPU Architectures for open xG Radio Hardware
  2. Radio Abstract Interfaces for xG Radio Hardware
  3. Security for xG Radio Hardware
Sustainability and Interoperability
1. Sustainability Initiatives
  1. High Impact Life Cycle Management Initiatives
  2. Novel and Standardized Metrics for Measuring Resource Consumption
2. Supply Chain
  1. Introducing Standardized Carbon Reporting

The following provides a sample proposal outline form:

Cover Page (1 page)

Title of the proposal: Provide a descriptive title of the proposed project.
Names and contact information of all the companies participating in the collaboration:
Names of any research institute liaisons for the proposed research:
The total funding amount requested
Total cost-sharing amount: This is the amount of non-OCP cost-sharing provided if the proposal were to be funded.
In the spirit of OCP’s tenet of openness, the research intends to be broadly usable by the community. How will you enable this? Where and when they intend to publish the research and/or collateral.

Executive Summary (1 page)

Clearly describe the focus of the project and its expected impact.

Detailed Project Proposal (3 pages maximum)

Describe the proposed project, its novelty, and expected impact on the state-of-the-art.
Include and preliminary lab results as appropriate, to articulate the project plan and highlight its progress.

Statement of Work (2 pages maximum)

Clearly describe the tasks in the proposed project, their schedule, and any deliverables.

Communication and Collaboration (2 pages maximum)

Include details on how the project team plans to communicate their results with the OCP Community.
Please include details on the collaboration plan. The collaboration plan will need to describe the specific roles of all the personnel involved, and how the project will be managed and coordinated.
Please disclose any relevant ongoing projects and funding.

Proposal Personnel (2 pages maximum per CV)

Include two-page CVs of each project participant.

Budget (no page limit)

Include a cost proposal that breaks down the total budget across key line items, such as the number of people to be funded, equipment, and travel.
What type of hardware will be required to complete the project and is the project contingent on access to resources from working group members that your company does not currently have.