Alibaba Cloud Showcases Optical Interconnect Innovations at OFC 2025 50th Anniversary

In March 2025, the 50th anniversary of the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference opened in San Francisco, gathering about 17,000 experts, scholars, enterprises, and government representatives from 83 countries. The event highlighted breakthroughs such as 1.6 T/3.2 T coherent transmission systems, 400 G/Lane demos, and advances in Co‑Packaged Optics (CPO), Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO), and hollow‑core fibers.

Alibaba Cloud participated with multiple experts, delivering two invited talks titled “Optical Interconnects for AI Computing Applications” and “Pluggable Optics Evolution inside Modern Data Center.” The first talk reviewed the evolution of data‑center optical interconnects, emphasized the heightened speed, latency, power, and reliability demands of AI workloads, and examined emerging solutions such as CPO, LPO, and Linear Receive Optics (LRO). The second talk delved deeper into LPO and CPO, sharing Alibaba Cloud’s deployment experience, resilience‑focused design philosophy, and challenges for 448 G optical modules.

Alibaba Cloud experts also presented at the Data Center Summit and round‑table discussions, introducing the AI‑optimized data‑center network architecture HPN 7.0 and showcasing self‑developed networking solutions that emphasize autonomous control and hardware‑software decoupling.

Two original research papers were highlighted: “Improving QoT Estimation Accuracy in Production Networks: A Data‑Driven Approach to Address OLS Imperfections,” which proposes a hybrid data‑driven and static modeling framework to capture non‑idealities such as multi‑reflection points in optical cables; and “Transceiver Penalty and Amplifier Noise Figure Characterization for Accurate QoT Estimation in Hyperscale Disaggregated DCI Networks,” a joint effort with Hong Kong Polytechnic University that models transceiver and amplifier frequency characteristics for precise QoT assessment in metro and hyperscale networks.

Overall, Alibaba Cloud’s contributions at OFC 2025 underscored its commitment to advancing optical networking for AI and cloud computing, fostering an “AI + optical network” ecosystem, and supporting the broader digital economy.