🔒Wallingford’s Amphenol helping to define AI data center connectivity standards

Wallingford-based Amphenol is part of a new group of technology companies collaborating to advance and scale optical connections for AI data centers. The companies say that standardizing what is known as expanded beam optical technology offers advantages in reliability, ease of maintenance and performance in data center applications. In addition to Amphenol, the 17-member multi-source agreement (MSA) includes 3M, Cisco, Meta and Oracle. Such MSAs are frequently used to define industry-standard specifications for electrical interfaces and optical connectivity. The companies say that a technical working group has begun development of the first connector specification, and that the MSA is open to additional members across the data center and networking ecosystem. Part of the group’s remit is also to establish a diverse supplier ecosystem for operators of AI infrastructure. "As AI workloads scale, the physical layer of data centers is being pushed to new limits — requiring optical connectivity solutions that are not only high-performance, but also interoperable and scalable across a growing ecosystem," said Alex An, vice president of 3M’s data center vertical.