Huawei's Data Center All-Optical Switch Wins the Special Prize at Interop Tokyo 2025

[Tokyo, Japan, June 13, 2025] At Interop Tokyo 2025, the largest ICT exhibition in Japan, Huawei's DC-OXC Photon-Electronics Integration DCN in the AI Era (Data center all-optical switch - Huawei OptiXtrans DC808) won the Best of Show Award Special Prize.

Huawei won the Special Prize at Interop Tokyo 2025

The Best of Show Awards are a highly coveted part of Interop Tokyo, the winners of which are chosen after stringent evaluations by a judging panel made up of industry-leading experts and university professors. Awards are granted only to the most innovative, industry-leading, and commercially valuable products and solutions.

As foundation model parameters surge in scale, higher intelligent computing power is required. Yet the large scale of intelligent computing clusters presents a series of challenges to conventional switch networking in terms of networking scale, scalability, availability, and power consumption.

Huawei has innovatively introduced the all-optical cross-connect (OXC) technology to data center networks (DCNs) and launched the industry-leading DC optical switch — Huawei OptiXtrans DC808 — to build a next-generation optical-electrical hybrid computing DCN for the AI era. The optical switch brings the following benefits:

Large-scale elastic networking: The switch features high port density and low power consumption. The intelligent computing clusters can be networked by phase based on the point of delivery (PoD) granularity, which is specified in the mid- and long-term target networking plan. Computing resources can be flexibly allocated, leased, and sold in minutes, and the flexible topology improves the computing efficiency of computing clusters.

Ultra-high reliability: The switch requires no optical modules, reducing the total number of optical modules on the entire network. The fault rate caused by optical module failures on DCNs is cut by 20%.

Smooth evolution: All-optical switching eliminates the need to sense the port rate and protocol of downstream switches, and supports smooth evolution from 400G to 800G or even higher without changing optical switches. Cross-generation DCNs are supported, where multi-generation rates are converged in a unified architecture. This stabilizes the DCN architecture and reduces investment costs.

Energy saving: All-optical switching eliminates the need for O/E conversion and data forwarding. For example, 400G ports can slash power consumption by 98% and reduce energy consumption of the entire network by 20%.

According to the expert judge team of Interop Tokyo 2025: "This product provides unlimited bandwidth and uses the micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) to implement high-speed and stable all-optical switching. It will play an important role in future AI DCNs. We highly appreciate its future potential and application scale, and award it the Special Prize."

Huawei will continue to innovate in DCN technologies and develop new products to help improve the scale and efficiency of intelligent computing clusters, thereby enhancing computing with fiber.