Tom Williams, Acacia’s VP of Marketing, kicked off ECOC 2026 Market Focus with a presentation that dived into industry trends and provided successful strategies for scale-across and scale-out networking. With AI driving tremendous growth throughout the industry, cost/bit is still important, but optimizing for GPU utilization has become the key metric for success. In his presentation, Tom discussed future architectures for scale across that are expected to co-exist with pluggable implementations. With coherent continuing to move to shorter reaches, it is becoming increasingly important to match optical technologies to market need. Liquid cooling technologies were also discussed as well as the future of the data center and what we can expect in the next 10 years as AI innovation drives the successful introduction of so many new technologies.
