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ESUN: Open Ethernet for the AI Scale-Up Era#

OCP Global Summit 2026 digest Program Core pick 12–15 October 2026

Abstract Session recording Materials

Pratik Marolia (Microsoft), Manoj Wadekar (Meta)

  • Why: Scale-up (in-rack/in-pod XPU interconnect) was the last proprietary holdout — NVLink territory. ESUN 1.0, ratified by OCP in March 2026 with 170+ contributors from 20+ organizations including NVIDIA itself, is the strongest signal yet that open Ethernet is expanding from scale-out into scale-up.
  • What: An operator-requirements specification for Ethernet-based scale-up networks: minimizing header/framing overhead designed for general internet traffic, and breaking single-vendor interconnect lock-in (from abstract only).
  • How: Cross-industry coalition (Meta, Microsoft, AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Marvell, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle) producing an OCP spec in months; the talk covers the what and the roadmap for future versions.
  • Where applicable: Industry-wide; it is a requirements/spec document, so its impact depends on silicon (Tomahawk-class and similar) implementing it — pair with the SUE-T and Tahan talks for the transport and hardware instantiations.