Resolight Shares First Standard Support for Nanosecond OCS: Enabling a Step Change in AI Workload Economics

Specifications enable native photon routing, with the potential for up to 40× better network energy efficiency and 75% fewer optical transceivers in AI networks

SUNNYVALE, Calif., October 20, 2026--Resolight.ai the pioneer of nanosecond OCS for the AI data plane, applauded CPO specifications from the Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) addressing the protocol integration needed to enable native photon routing through nanosecond optical circuit switching (OCS). The specifications were announced today at the Optica + APC PECC Summit, establishing a standards foundation for dramatically more efficient AI networks.

The announcement comes as the industry confronts a fundamental challenge: making AI economically sustainable at scale. In its recent analysis, McKinsey identifies the cost of serving AI as a barrier to widespread adoption, highlighting the energy and latency costs of moving data as a target for semiconductor innovation. Delivering more useful AI output per dollar requires improvements across the system—including the network connecting its accelerators. Nanosecond OCS brings a new architectural opportunity to that challenge.

What is Nanosecond OCS?

Conventional OCS reconfigures optical connections, while electronic switches typically continue to handle data switching. Native photon routing extends optical switching into the data plane itself, directing coordinated data transfers through the network while keeping their payloads in the light domain.

By avoiding repeated optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversions, Resolight's architecture targets up to 40× better network energy efficiency and up to 75% fewer optical transceivers in multi-rack AI scale-up networks. These improvements can reduce networking power, hardware requirements and infrastructure footprint, helping improve the economics of delivering AI workloads. Actual benefits depend on topology and implementation.

Optical supply constraints add urgency to this opportunity as AI infrastructure expands.

Alongside essential investment in manufacturing capacity, reducing the optical hardware needed per network offers an architectural way to ease that pressure. By eliminating up to three quarters of transceiver requirements, Resolight aims to reduce the components operators must source and deploy, helping them scale AI networks with less hardware and power.

"The industry needs more than faster connections—it needs a more efficient way to move and switch data with economics and a real plan to scale AI data center requirements" said Ofer Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Resolight. "We have seen tremendous interest, excitement, and discussion around nanosecond OCS and native photon routing. APC's CPO specification marks an important milestone: connecting photonic engines with the protocol coordination needed to make this architecture practical."