Lightwave’s ECOC 2026 panel highlights how to scale networks to support next-gen AI factories
Lightwave will host Inside the AI Fabric: Scaling the Networks Behind Tomorrow's AI Factories on September 23 during the ECOC 2026 panel in Malaga, Spain, on Wednesday afternoon.
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.
This panel brings together a leading AI infrastructure operator alongside experts to discuss how tomorrow’s AI fabrics are being designed today. Together, they’ll explore which technologies are ready for deployment, where the industry’s biggest bottlenecks remain, how networks are validated and operated at unprecedented scale, and which architectural decisions organizations should make now to prepare for the next generation of AI infrastructure.
Hosted by Peter Fretty, VP of Digital Infrastructure for Endeavor B2B, the panel will include panelists from three of the largest optical networking vendors--Lumentum, Marvell and Nokia--which are building next-gen optical networking gear to accommodate emerging data center needs.
Attendees will gain practical insight into the optical and networking innovations enabling tomorrow’s AI factories, while hearing firsthand how operators are balancing immediate deployment requirements with long-term architectural roadmaps.
Go to www.ecocexhibition.com/conference/ to find out more about our panel and the entire ECOC 2026 conference program.
Speakers
Neel Patel General Manager, Optical Component Solutions
General Manager, Optical Component Solutions
Nokia
As General Manager, P&L for Indium Phosphide, Silicon Photonics, electrical components (EIC), and DSP at Nokia, Patel focuses on enabling inter-DC and intra-DC pluggable optics, Co-packaged Optics (CPO), and Near-Packaged Optics (NPO). Earlier, he served as Vice President of Sales and Applications Engineering for Subsystems, jumpstarting Infinera's business in the hyperscale pluggable market, including custom developments. Prior to coming to Nokia, formerly Infinera, in 2023, Patel held various sales and business development roles at various networking vendors, including Cisco, Inphi, Texas Instruments, and Mindspeed Technologies.
Christian Urricariet
Senior Director of Product and Strategic Marketing for Lumentum
Christian Urricariet is the Senior Director, Product and Strategic Marketing for Lumentum. As an experienced and versatile Product Management and Product Marketing leader with a technical background in optoelectronics. He has a solid track record of working with cross-functional teams to successfully introduce and ramp innovative high-revenue products, while advocating cutting-edge photonics technologies and solutions to customers in the datacom/telecom market, including system OEMs, hyperscale cloud data centers, telecom service providers and enterprise users. Before assuming his role at Lumentum in 2025, Urricariet served in various business devleopment, marketing and sales roles at Intel, Coherent, Finisar and Raychem (now TE Connectivity).
Rishi Chugh
Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Switch Business, Marvell
Rishi Chugh currently serves as Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Switch Business Unit at Marvell. Before joining Marvell, he served as Vice President of Product Marketing at Cadence Design Systems and Senior Director of Product Marketing at Cavium, Inc., with a focus on ARM Server CPUs. His career also includes significant roles at Broadcom, Altera, and LSI Logic Corporation, where Rishi contributed to product strategy, market analysis, and product lifecycle management in the networking and semiconductor industries. He holds an MBA in Marketing from Santa Clara University, an MS in Electrical Engineering with a focus on VLSI Design from San Jose State University, and an undergraduate degree in Electronics from Thadomal Shahani Engineering College.
Moderator
