Survey: Inside the AI Fabric: Scaling the Networks Behind Tomorrow's AI Factories

During this year's ECOC 2026 trade show in Malaga, Spain, Lightwave is holding its Inside the AI Fabric: Scaling the Networks Behind Tomorrow's AI Factories roundtable panel. 

Hosted by Peter Fretty, VP of Digital Infrastructure for Endeavor B2B, the interactive session, which features voices from three key vendors, including Lumentum, Marvell and Nokia, will address how emerging optical networking technologies are creating new possibilities for what’s inside the data center.

As AI factories evolve from clusters of thousands of GPUs to infrastructures supporting hundreds of thousands of accelerators, the network fabric has become a defining constraint on performance, scalability, power efficiency, and cost.

Building these environments requires more than faster optics. Operators must balance scale-up architectures within AI clusters, scale-out networking across massive GPU fabrics, and increasingly scale-across strategies that connect distributed training environments into a unified AI infrastructure. At the same time, technologies including co-packaged optics (CPO), linear pluggable optics (LPO), silicon photonics, optical engines, advanced packaging, and next-generation Ethernet are rapidly reshaping what’s possible inside the data center.

We'd like to get your perspective on how to scale networks behind AI in this short survey.