Author: Mr. Lin Weizhi, Executive Vice President, Ji-Pu Industrial Trend Research Institute

From the ECOC 2025 European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communications, to the conference call between lasers Coherent and Lumentum at the end of the year, some clues have been revealed on the development of optical communications in AI in 2026. With the explosive growth of generative AI and massive GPU clusters, data center network switching architectures are facing unprecedented challenges and revolution. The traditional optical-electrical-optical (OEO) switching model has become a critical bottleneck limiting AI efficiency and scale. Optical Circuit Switching (OCS), a purely optical networking solution, is being deployed on a pilot basis and is now being commercialized on a large scale. In the following, we analyze and discuss the development prospects, core technologies, market positioning and drivers of OCS in 2026.

For the first time in the last three years, generative AI has allowed GPUs to grow much faster than the