At the first AI Optical Computing Industry Forum hosted by WAIC, industry dialogues took place. Tencent Cloud and Xizhi Technology affirmed the value of NPO.

Recently, at the first AI light computing power industry forum of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference hosted by Horizon Robotics, Tencent Cloud disclosed for the first time its new deployment plan for domestic computing power and optical interconnection: the company will deploy domestic computing power on a large scale next year and the year after, and is expected to deploy NPO super nodes by the fourth quarter of 2026, while calling for the promotion of unified domestic and foreign NPO industry standards. This move has once again sparked market attention to the NPO technology route. Currently, the large-scale deployment of AI computing power poses higher requirements for internal interconnection in data centers. Traditional copper cable interconnections face bottlenecks in bandwidth density and power consumption, and optical interconnection has become the key path to break through this bottleneck. NPO technology integrates optical engines with computing chips on the same board, shortening the distance of optical-electrical conversion, removing the most expensive DSP chips from optical modules, thereby significantly reducing power consumption and latency. Compared to CPO, the engineering adaptability of NPO is lower, and its disruption to the existing industry chain is also smaller. Tencent Cloud Vice President Wang Yachen said at WAIC: "As the scale of super nodes expands, optical interconnection has become the key to breaking through the bandwidth and power consumption bottlenecks, and NPO is a 'more pragmatic technical route' for constructing super nodes with domestic GPUs." Shen Yichen, founder of Horizon Robotics, also judged at the meeting that NPO is currently the "easiest to achieve in the first step, with the least disruption to the entire industry chain ecosystem" technical solution. The core reason is that after removing the DSP, although the performance requirements of the optical engine are significantly increased, the signal noise reduction brought by the shortened copper wire distance can partially compensate for the loss of removing the DSP. This makes the NPO solution advantageous in power consumption and cost. In fact, from the design of optical engines to advanced packaging processes, from testing equipment to upper-layer scheduling software, the maturity of each link will directly affect the actual performance of NPO super nodes. Wang Yachen also thanked industry partners including Horizon Robotics for their support in building domestic NPO super nodes. As a provider of optical-electronic hybrid computing power, Horizon Robotics has laid out comprehensively in both NPO and CPO fields: in the NPO field, it has formed application scenario cooperation with switch chip and GPU manufacturers, and in the CPO field, it has already conducted mutual technical verification with switch chip and GPU, highlighting the forward-looking layout of the scale-up optical interconnection industry. "What is most urgently needed now is to build a truly open industrial ecosystem in the vast computing power industry chain, allowing outstanding enterprises in computing, storage, switching, software, applications, and other links to maximize their respective advantages and jointly promote the upgrade of China's computing power infrastructure." Shen Yichen said.