Open Systems for Artificial Intelligence

Open Systems for AI is the umbrella Strategic Initiative that coordinates the OCP Community's work across its Projects and other Initiatives. It operates much like a Project but uniquely has a steering committee that identifies goals and gaps so that community workgroups can cooperate and prioritize work toward an open ecosystem for AI data center infrastructure. Its scope covers guiding and highlighting key AI infrastructure contributions and facilitating workshops and OCP Foundation alliances, organized into three work areas: DC Physical Infrastructure, DC IT Infrastructure, and Systems Management. Key resources include the whitepaper, OCP Academy AI courses, the AI Marketplace, and a 2025 series of community workshops.

Open Systems for AI

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About This Workstream

OCP’s “Open Systems for AI” Strategic Initiative is the umbrella structure that coordinates the Community’s work across our Projects and other Initiatives. As such, this umbrella operates much like a Project, with regular calls and a mailing list, but it uniquely has a steering committee that helps identify goals and gaps. Together, the larger Open Systems for AI group and the various Community workgroups can cooperate and prioritize work to deliver the promise of an open ecosystem for AI data center infrastructure.

Open Systems for AI

Key Resources

Start with the Open Systems for AI whitepaper and the matching OCP Academy courses, then explore AI listings and events.

Open Systems for AI WhitepaperOCP Academy AI Training CoursesOCP AI Marketplace Listings & AI Resource HubAI-Focused Past, Present & Future Events

AI is the most prominent use case driving hyperscale centralized data center innovation today, followed by what we expect is the next wave of AI: inference that extends AI to regional and edge data-center-like infrastructure, which we refer to as the AI Computing Continuum. The innovation cycles for AI data centers, as well as co-design specialization, can boost performance but trade off strength in a diverse supply chain, increase costs, and reduce efficiency. To solve this challenge, the industry must find commonalities and an evolvable approach to AI infrastructure, as it did for cloud data centers in the OCP Community.

In late 2025, most hyperscalers signed an open letter published by the OCP Community to encourage more open collaboration for more fungible data center physical facilities and grid interconnect, more open IT hardware for AI, and systems management specifications. OCP’s trusted IP model encourages safe collaboration, greater interoperability, and composability among vendors, benefiting the entire market.

Open Systems for AI work areas

2025 Community Workshops

The community organized technical workshops for a more detailed exchange of ideas and presentations, grouped into the three Open Systems for AI work areas and held in sequence:

DC Physical Infrastructure

  • Enabling the 1MW AI Rack (Power, Cooling and DCF) — Workshop 1, April 9, 2025 (recording)
  • Power and Cooling for AI Focus — May 15, 2025 (recording)
  • DCF and Third-party Colo Providers — May 22, 2025 (recording)

DC IT Infrastructure

  • Silicon and Chiplets for AI — June 24, 2025 (recording)
  • Server Designs and Management for AI — July 29, 2025 (recording)
  • Pod and Cluster Network Interconnects for AI — August 26, 2025 (recording)
  • Photonics and Optical Interconnects for AI — September 9, 2025 (recording)

Systems Management

  • AI Systems Management Workshop (1 of 2) — November 12, 2025 (recording)
  • AI Systems Management Workshop (2 of 2) — December 9, 2025 (recording)

Scope

The scope of the Open Systems for AI umbrella Strategic Initiative covers guiding and highlighting work toward key AI infrastructure contributions, and facilitating workshops and OCP Foundation alliances to help span boundaries across the vast array of OCP workgroups and external supporting organizations. Its work is organized into three areas:

  • DC Physical Infrastructure : power, cooling, and data center facilities for AI, including the 1 MW AI rack and third-party colocation providers
  • DC IT Infrastructure : silicon and chiplets, server designs and management, pod and cluster network interconnects, and photonics and optical interconnects for AI
  • Systems Management : management of AI systems across IT and facility infrastructure

Resources

Welcome to the OCP – Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative

The workstream operates under the Strategic Initiatives Project

Disclaimer: Please do not submit any confidential information. All presentation materials, proposals, meeting minutes and/or supporting documents are published by OCP and are open to the public in accordance to OCP’s Bylaws and IP Policy. This can be found on the OCP OCP Policies page. If you have any questions please contact OCP.

Description

Within the OCP mission focus on data centers, AI is today’s market most prominent data center use case driving innovations, followed by HPC and the emerging edge. Moreover, AI clusters are pushing technology innovation to new heights when implemented at ever larger scale by hyperscalers—foundational community constituents of the OCP. The OCP is, thus, well aligned with current AI trends. Its Community brings together hyperscale data center operators, vendors, solution providers, and colocation providers as OCP members, offering sustainable at-scale computational infrastructure and best practices to deliver AI for hyperscalers who also lead the way for enterprises.

AI and HPC workloads are also distributed and diverse, much more so than other virtualized and cloud-native applications. In the pursuit of greater performance, infrastructure specialization for some workload categories is burgeoning, but risks fracturing the supply chain into silos, raising costs and reducing efficiencies. This is exacerbated by the accelerated drive for innovation to meet new requirements in the hardware ecosystem and rush for all players in the market to provide solutions.

To prevent these downsides, the OCP facilitates open-sourcing hardware specifications and standardizing building blocks that are forged for the most demanding hyperscale solutions. The OCP’s trusted IP model allows multiple vendors to safely collaborate and specialize their products with greater interoperability and composability which benefits those vendors as well as the customers, moving the entire market forward. Spanning the OCP Projects, the OCP “Open Systems for AI” Strategic Initiative brings together the work of the Community to meet AI’s scale and workload diversity.

Learn more about the Open Systems for AI in depth through the community’s whitepaper or matching eLearning AI training courses on OCP Academy

Scope

Milestones

  • White paper published in 1Q 2025 after drafted and refining in 2024 (see Documents below)
  • Coverage and gap map created in 2024 (see Documents below)
  • Workshop series in 2025
  • Over 100 sessions on AI across the OCP events delivered by the OCP Community.
  • Many new and key contributions such as HGX and MGX, Catalina, Mt Diablo, Deschutes, Scale-up Ethernet (SUE) and past OCP contributions related to AI clusters such as OpenRack (especially HPR), GrandTeton server, HGX, Falcon transport protocol, OPF8 and more.

Documents

Call Recordings

Open Systems for Artificial Intelligence calendar

Related Details

Contributions

All project contributions

Sub-Projects

IT Systems Workshop

The IT Systems Workshop is a community workshop of the OCP Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative, held virtually on July 29, 2025 as the "Server Designs and Management for AI" session of the initiative's 2025 workshop series in the DC IT Infrastructure work area. It brought together practitioners to share knowledge and vision on AI server designs and management, with sessions on the Mt. Diablo server scope, high-efficiency storage cooling, AI infrastructure management through open standards, the Open Cluster Designs initiative, CXL tiered memory and MRDIMM, memory-efficient RAG pipelines, and DC-MHS. The agenda, slides, and recording are available on the event page.

Photonics and Optical Interconnects for AI

Photonics and Optical Interconnects for AI is a community workshop of the OCP Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative, held virtually on September 9, 2025 as part of the initiative's 2025 workshop series in the DC IT Infrastructure work area. A follow-on to the Pod and Cluster Network Interconnects for AI workshop, it brought together engineers and architects to explore the photonics and optical side of AI interconnects, with sessions on breaking the rack with light, 448G signaling and interconnect solutions, WDM optics for scale-up, pluggable optics for immersion cooling, and 3D integrated optics for frontier MoE training. The agenda and slides are available on the event page.

Pod and Cluster Network Interconnects for AI

Pod and Cluster Network Interconnects for AI is a community workshop of the OCP Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative, held virtually on August 26, 2025 as part of the initiative's 2025 workshop series in the DC IT Infrastructure work area. It brought together engineers and architects to share knowledge and vision on AI pod and cluster network interconnects, with sessions on the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Ethernet in next-generation AI architectures, scheduled fabrics and multi-pathing, programmable congestion control, copper scale-up interconnects, Scale Up Ethernet, UALink, and observability in NICs and DPUs. The agenda and slides are available on the event page.