Corning Collaborates with Broadcom to Accelerate AI Data Center Processing Capacity

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Corning Incorporated, a world leader in glass science and optical physics, today announced a collaboration with Broadcom Incorporated, a leading supplier in the semiconductor field, on a co-packaged optics (CPO) infrastructure that will significantly increase processing capacity within data centers.

Corning will supply cutting-edge optical components for Broadcom’s Bailly CPO system, the industry’s first CPO-based 51.2 terabit per second (TBps) ethernet switch. This combination will deliver significant improvements in optical interconnection density and power savings, making it ideal for large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) clusters.

CPO infrastructure is meeting the needs of AI workloads by improving networking and processing bandwidth, density, and power efficiency inside data centers by placing optics and electronics closer together in a processing system. CPO can take AI to the next level by enabling higher speeds and densities while improving overall power efficiency in data centers.

Broadcom’s Bailly CPO system incorporates eight silicon photonics-based, 6.4 TBps optical engines that are co-packaged with Broadcom’s StrataXGS® Tomahawk®5 Ethernet switch chip. Corning is now a qualified supplier of the optical infrastructure that is needed to bring fibers to these optical engines. The fiber harnesses that make up this optical infrastructure include connectors for the front-plate and external laser modules, single mode and polarization maintaining fibers, and fiber array units (FAUs) that connect the fibers to the optical engines with a high degree of precision and reliability.

“As AI-enabled data centers continue to scale, Corning has been collaborating with Broadcom to ensure CPO connectivity needs are met with a high degree of performance and reliability,” said Benoit Fleury, Director, CPO Business Development, Corning Optical Communications. “With this latest collaboration, we're delivering an optical connectivity solution that enables unprecedented speeds and bandwidth concentrations with lower power consumptions and costs.”

“The explosive growth of AI workloads is driving unprecedented demands on interconnect bandwidth. Our multi-year collaboration with Corning on high density fiber connectivity solutions for the TH5-Bailly CPO system has resulted in breakthrough performance at scale,” said Sheng Zhang, Chief Technology Officer of Optical Systems Division, Broadcom. “We’re thrilled to deepen this relationship as we work together on the next-generation 200G per lane CPO solutions—unlocking even greater power efficiency and bandwidth density for the next generation of AI-powered data centers.”