PUBLISHER: MTN Consulting, LLC | PRODUCT CODE: 2136219
PUBLISHER: MTN Consulting, LLC | PRODUCT CODE: 2136219
Huawei Leads Nvidia in Published AI Interconnect Research at OFC and ECOC
Report Summary
Huawei co-authors 7 of the 95 AI interconnect papers at ECOC 2025 and OFC 2026, more than any other company; Nvidia co-authors 4. The gap concentrates in one layer: scale-across, the optical link between data centers rather than inside a rack. Nvidia has no paper on this topic at either event, even as it has built scale-across into a pillar of its own product line, announcing Spectrum-XGS Ethernet on 22 August 2025 with CoreWeave as an early adopter. The optical research underpinning scale-across in this sample comes entirely from Huawei, European research groups and Chinese telecom operators.
Huawei’s papers span 4 of the 5 AI interconnect sub-topics we track; Nvidia’s span 3 and stay inside the data center. China’s cloud and AI-platform authors publish real operating data, including results from a production fleet and Alibaba’s insertion-loss-budget and bit-error-rate target for a 102.4 Tb/s switch (W2A.43), while the 6 comparable American papers report lab evaluations and demonstrations.
Nvidia’s own named optics ecosystem is thin in the research base. Of the eleven silicon photonics partners it named in March 2025, only two, Corning and Sumitomo Electric, appear anywhere in the 95-paper set. Furukawa Electric, the most-published laser supplier in the sample with 5 papers, is not on that list.
China’s share of AI interconnect research outpaces its share of each conference’s overall program: an index of 1.23 at ECOC 2025 and 1.05 at OFC 2026, against 0.70 and 0.42 for Europe.
This preview covers the full 2020-2026 ECOC and OFC trend, five interconnect layers, the country and organization split behind it, and the complete 95-paper appendix by conference, organization, country and sub-topic.
Table of Contents
- Summary
- What we counted
- AI interconnect’s share of conference papers grew from 4% to 9% in six years
- Huawei papers address 4 interconnect layers, Nvidia is 3
- What the hyperscalers publish, and what they hold back
- Nvidia’s named optics partners are not in the research base
- China outperforms on AI interconnect research, Europe underperforms
- Limitations of our analysis
- Implications
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1: Method, definitions and limits
- Appendix 2: Papers in this analysis
- Appendix 3: Report and publisher information
Coverage
Organizations mentioned:
- AIO Core
- AIST
- Alibaba
- Alibaba Cloud
- Ambition Photonics
- AttoTude
- AuthenX
- Ayar Labs
- Baidu
- Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
- Berxel
- Browave
- BT
- CAICT
- CEA-Leti
- China Mobile
- China Telecom
- China Unicom
- Ciena
- Coherent
- CoreWeave
- Corning
- CSA Catapult
- Deutsche Telekom
- Dublin City University
- Eindhoven University of Technology
- EPFL
- Ericsson
- Fabrinet
- FormFactor
- Foxconn
- Fraunhofer
- Fudan University
- Fujifilm
- Furukawa Electric
- GeNopsys
- GlobalFoundries
- Huawei
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology
- ICON Photonics
- imec
- Innolume
- Institute of Computing Technology, CAS
- Institute of Science Tokyo
- Kagawa University
- KDDI
- Keio University
- KPN
- Ligent
- Linfiber Technology
- Lumentum
- Max Planck Institute
- Meta
- Mitsubishi Electric
- Nanjing University
- National University of Defense Technology
- National University of Singapore
- Nokia
- NTT
- Nvidia
- Orange
- Peking University
- Politecnico di Milano
- QoreTek
- RCALS Centre for Advanced Lightwave Science
- Ruijie
- Samsung
- SENKO
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Solinide Photonics
- SPIL
- Sumitomo Electric
- Suzhou Everbright Photonics
- Telefonica
- TFC Communication
- TIM
- TSMC
- TSRI
- Tyndall
- UC Davis
- UC Santa Barbara
- UESTC
- University of Bristol
- University of Cambridge
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
- University of Hong Kong
- University of Science and Technology of China
- YOFC
- Zhangjiang Laboratory
- Zhejiang University
- ZTE
Figure & Charts
- Figure 1: AI interconnect reached 6.3% of ECOC papers in 2025 and 8.8% of OFC 2026
- Figure 2: Huawei co-authors 7 of the 95 recent AI interconnect papers, Nvidia 4
- Figure 3: Scale-up, scale-out and scale-across, and who publishes on each
- Figure 4: The two cloud papers reporting production fleet data are both Chinese
- Figure 5: Europe holds 51.6% of ECOC 2025 papers and 36.4% of its AI interconnect papers
- Figure 6: China leads or ties 4 of the five AI interconnect sub-topics, Europe leads 1, the smallest of the five at 8 papers
- Table 1: The 95 AI interconnect papers behind Figures 2 through 6, by conference, organization, country and sub-topic
