Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) headline a new coalition to bolster AI data center infrastructure through optical technology.

The Expanded Beam Optics MultiSource Agreement (EBO MSA) Group aims to establish open, interoperable standards for expanded beam optical connectivity. The technology relies on lenses to expand and collimate the light exiting a fiber, transmitting it across a gap between connectors before refocusing it into the receiving fiber.

3M plays a major part in the group, having previously patented a microscopic, high-precision ferrule design that allows expanded beam technology to be used on a massive scale for single-mode fibers and high-density multifiber cables with minimal light loss.

Others in the group include Accelink, Aperion, AMD, Amphenol, Arista Networks, Meta, Molex, Nexthop-ai, Oracle, Senko, Source Photonics, Sumitomo, TE Connectivity, ViaPhoton, and Xscape Photonics.

Rajagopal Subramaniyan, SVP for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) networking at Oracle, explained that surging AI workloads place increasing pressure on data centers. The problem is exacerbated by physical contact-based fiber-optic connectors that require extreme precision and strict hygiene.

“[These] requirements slow network builds and add operational overhead for ongoing link triage,” Subramaniyan noted. “Expanded beam technology can overcome these bottlenecks, enabling more resilient cluster topologies and future rack-scale optical architectures.”

Subramaniyan added that the EBO MSA venture would be “essential to establishing a diverse supplier ecosystem for hyperscale cloud and AI operators."

Cisco warned this title in an interview last year that AI infrastructure was highly sensitive to failures in optical fiber, making the once-minor concern of error bursts a major problem as networks face rising capacity pressures.

Cisco's EBO efforts follow on from an expansion of its optics offerings last month, which saw the release of the Open Transport 3000 Series, a multirail, open line system which integrated optical components for multiple fiber rails into a single line card.

The coalition's formation comes as Dell’Oro Group claimed the global optical transport market rebounded in 2025, growing 10% year-over-year to reach $16 billion. The market’s recovery was fueled largely by hyperscale cloud providers investing heavily in data center interconnect (DCI) infrastructure to support AI-driven workloads and expanding data center footprints.

“Sales of optical equipment for DCI spiked in 2025 due to huge demand from cloud providers,” Dell’Oro Group VP Jimmy Yu noted in a statement, adding that hyperscalers still make up the majority of spending, but the growing wave of “neocloud” vendors is contributing additional demand.

Yu added that to expand AI data centers, cloud providers are moving toward the “scale-across” sort of DCI architectures, which the EBO coalition is striving to support with its research.