OCP Community News - October 22, 2026

In this edition:

• 2026 OCP Global Summit Recap

• Welcome the newest members joining the OCP Community

• Intelligent Cooling Infrastructure on theOCP Marketplace

• Updated Liquid Cooling Courses on OCP Academy

• New Contributions to the OCP Database

• Get the latest on upcoming webinars, Tech Days, and the OCP events

2026 OCP Global Summit: Record-Breaking Attendance & Innovation!

The 2026 OCP Global Summit brought together 15,000 attendees in San Jose, California — a 38% increase over 2025 and the largest Global Summit in OCP history!

Under the theme “Scaling Innovation for the AI Era,” the sold-out event featured 948 speakers, 578 sessions and 22 content tracks, bringing together industry leaders and innovators from more than 3,400 organizations across 64 countries.

With advancements spanning AI infrastructure, networking, power and cooling, the Summit brought the global community together to share technical innovations, exchange ideas and strengthen industry collaboration.

Relive the highlights here! Explore keynote presentations, technical sessions and more through our Summit recordings, slides and photos.

Read the full 2026 OCP Summit “By the Numbers” recap here.

OCP in Action: Driving Growth & Community Impact

Beyond the record-breaking attendance, the Summit marked several important milestones for OCP. From new research demonstrating the growing market and economic value of open computing to the launch of OCP Nexus and continued growth of OCP Academy, these four announcements highlight the expanding reach and impact of the OCP Community.

IDC raised its OCP infrastructure forecast to $800 billion annually by 2029.That is approximately 2.7 times its previous forecast for the same year. The study projects $892 billion in 2030, representing approximately 51% of spending across the infrastructure categories measured.

OCP released evidence quantifying the value of participation.Findings included approximately 5% lower average total cost of ownership, up to 15% faster deployment, and up to 30% shorter qualification timelines. Some hyperscale respondents reported 150× ROI (may not be a typical outcome).

OCP launched Nexus, its AI knowledge assistant.Nexus provides conversational access to specifications, reference designs, white papers, and Summit materials, with citations to supporting sources.

OCP Academy turned 1-year old with over 6,000 usersWith over 6,000 learners joining OCP Academy since it launched at the 2025 Global Summit, OCP announced the success and momentum from the keynote stage. By the end of Summit we had nearly 7,000 users signed up for free learning about specs, papers, and presentations, all in friendly, self-paced, and on-demand e-learning. OCP Academy has well over 150 course modules and many are translated into 7 languages besides English.

Save the Dates: OCP Global Summit Moves to San Francisco!

Beginning in 2027, the OCP Global Summit moves to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California, offering expanded capacity and even more opportunities for our growing global Community to connect and collaborate.

Mark your calendars for future OCP Global Summits:

• 2027: October 4–7

• 2028: September 25–28

• 2029: October 15–18

• 2030: September 30–October 3

New Sponsor Application Process: Beginning November 2, 2026, the sponsor application process will be conducted entirely online. A dedicated submission link will be open for three weeks. During that window, interested organizations are invited to apply by completing a short questionnaire indicating their sponsorship package preferences.

When reviewing and allocating sponsorship opportunities, OCP considers a number of factors, including:

• Previous participation in OCP events as a sponsor

• OCP membership status

• Volunteer leadership roles

• OCP Contributions

• Products and services on the OCP Marketplace

• Participation in project calls

• Attendance at OCP events

• Overall engagement within the OCP Community

This updated process is designed to ensure a fair, transparent, and community-driven approach to sponsorship selection.

2026 OCP Future Technologies Symposium (FTS) Best Paper Award Winners

We’re excited to recognize the outstanding research and innovation celebrated at this year’s OCP Future Technologies Symposium, held in conjunction with the 2026 OCP Global Summit!

These award-winning papers highlight groundbreaking approaches to advancing AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and sustainability.

Overall Best Paper Award:
“Copper Sintering BGA Interconnect for Mitigating Electromigration in High-Current AI Power Delivery”
-Chengjie Du, Xufu Ren, and Prof. Teng Long | University of Cambridge

AI/HPC Best Paper Award:
“Wavelength-Granular OCS with Solid-State OPA: Energy-per-Bit for AI Fabrics”
-Zhongxiang Zhang and Shan Che | Shenzhen Litratech Co. Ltd. and Pixora LLC

Sustainability Best Paper Award:
“Towards Sustainable AI Data Centers Through Direct Waste Heat Recovery Enabled by Membrane-Assisted Heat Sink Technology”
-Saeed Moghaddam and Roshith Mittakolu | University of Florida and University of Maryland, College Park

Welcome these new members to the OCP Community

OCP Silver

OCP Bronze

Intelligent Cooling Infrastructure

Supporting the next generation of liquid-cooled AI and hyperscale data centers, these newly listed solutions bring together monitoring, heat exchange, coolant distribution, and quick-disconnect connectivity to keep cooling loops running efficiently and reliably.

Updated Liquid Cooling Courses on OCP Academy

Strengthen your understanding of cold-plate cooling with two updated OCP Academy courses. Cooling Fluids in Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) covers practical single-phase fluid selection, commissioning, monitoring, and maintenance, now incorporating the published OCP water-based coolant and PG25 specifications and community feedback. Two-Phase Direct Liquid Cooling Efficiencies and Fluids explores phase-change cooling, dielectric fluids, efficiency, and operations. Together, they help designers and operators understand the distinct requirements of each approach.

If you are interested in learning more about how to contribute to OCP, take this brief OCP Contribution Process coursein the OCP Academy.

OCP Educational Webinar: Programmable by Design: Building Open Networking That Evolves at the Pace of AI

Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM ET
Duration: 1 Hour; Virtual event

AI workloads are reshaping how data moves across compute, memory, storage and networking. Join AMD and Dell’Oro for a technical discussion on the evolution of front-end, scale-up and scale-out networks—including DPU offload, KV-cache architectures, programmable AI NICs, open Ethernet transports and AMD Helios. Explore the engineering tradeoffs influencing accelerator utilization, resiliency and the performance of large-scale AI systems.

What will you learn?

• AI networking market overview and key trends shaping next-generation AI infrastructure

• Evolving front-end networking requirements for distributed inference, KV-cache movement, and data-intensive AI workloads

• Scale-up architecture considerations for resiliency, fault isolation, and recovery within rack-scale AI systems

• Programmable AI NICs and open Ethernet transports for high-performance scale-out networking across large AI clusters

• The role of programmability and open networking in adapting infrastructure as AI workloads, transports, and system requirements evolve

• AMD Helios as an open rack-scale architecture integrating AMD EPYC™ CPUs, AMD Instinct™ accelerators, and AMD Pensando™ networking.

OCP Educational Webinar: Cleaner Coolant, Fewer Failures: What Next-Gen High-TDP Chips Mean for Liquid Cooling Requirements

Date: Thursday, December 3, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM ET
Duration: 1 Hour, Virtual event

Coolant cleanliness is critical to reliable liquid-cooled AI infrastructure. Join PFX Group, Dell’Oro Group and OCP for a practical look at evolving PG25 and water-based coolant requirements, fluid condition monitoring, and how filtration, sampling and material compatibility can help operators and hardware designers prepare for next-generation deployments.

What will you learn?

• Importance of heat transfer fluid cleanliness in next-generation liquid cooling systems

• Impact of particle size and particle count on microchannel cold plates

• Evolving heat transfer fluid requirements for platforms such as NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin and Feynman

• How heat transfer fluids change as they age in service

• Key parameters to monitor when assessing fluid health

• Testing and remediation strategies for aging fluids

• Role of fluid selection and condition monitoring in supporting system reliability & uptime

Data Centre World Madrid

Date: November 4 - 5, 2026

Location: Madrid

Learn more here.

Free event passes are available to OCP members

OCP Panel: Standardising the AI Data Center: Inside OCP's Open Data Center for AI - Tech Show Madrid

Join OCP and senior representatives from ABB, Schneider Electric and Vertiv at Tech Show Madrid on November 4 to explore how open standards can simplify AI data center power, cooling and rack integration. Hear lessons from real-world projects and learn how to help shape the next phase of standardization.

Supercompute (SC26)

Date: November 16 to 19, 2026

Location: Chicago, IL, USA

OCP Booth: 4900

Digital Infrastructure World

Date: February 3 - 4, 2027

Location: San Jose, CA

Learn more here.

Digital Infrastructure World is the first global forum dedicated exclusively to the convergence of IT and OT - the integration now required to design, architect and scale the next generation of AI infrastructure.

OCP will host a full-day track focused on designing the 1MW Rack, the DIW event will feature tracks on Clusters, Facilities and Deployments.

The Sponsor Prospectus is now ready!

Call for Papers Launches November 16

The OCP EMEA Summit has grown from 725 attendees in 2024 to a record-setting 2,110 attendees in 2026, bringing together more than 750 organizations, 325 speakers, 86 sponsors and exhibitors, and participants from 52 countries.

In 2027, the conversation moves to Hamburg, with an emphasis on:

Data center sustainability
AI infrastructure
Security and data protection
Power and cooling
OCP technology deployments
Quantum, optics and telecommunications

The newly released Sponsor Prospectus offers a range of opportunities to:

• Showcase your technology in the Expo Hall

• Build visibility with a highly technical, senior global audience

• Connect directly with operators, engineers, architects and decision-makers

• Support the open collaboration advancing scalable and sustainable infrastructure across EMEA

Dates: August 10-12, 2027

Location: Taipei City, Taiwan

The OCP APAC Summit is the region’s flagship gathering for open data center innovation. Hosted annually in Taipei City, the Summit convenes global hyperscalers, hardware vendors, telecoms, colocation providers, and solution providers to accelerate adoption of OCP-recognized designs.

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