OCP Launches New “Open Data Center for AI” Strategic Initiative
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 14, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), the nonprofit international organization bringing at-scale innovations and hyperscale best practices to all, announces an expansion to its Open Systems for AI, an umbrella initiative with the new Open Data Center for AI Strategic Initiative (SI), to increase efforts on key data center infrastructure challenges: power, cooling, mechanical, and management telemetry. The addition of this new strategic initiative is in response to a large increase in data center physical infrastructure projects and workstreams launched in the past year, learnings from the OCP Open Systems for AI SI workshop series, and the new open-letter call for collaboration. With strong support from the OCP Board and stakeholders, the Foundation invites other organizations to sign this letter, which was initiated by Google, Meta, and Microsoft.. This underscores the OCP Foundation’s mission to support the entire open data center ecosystem, covering IT as well as physical data center infrastructure and facilities.
The mandate of the Open Data Center for AI SI is to develop standardizations for data center infrastructure allowing advanced high-density AI infrastructure to be deployed as flexibly as traditional compute where facilities are built with a common understanding of management telemetry, advanced power and cooling technologies to enable simpler deployment of a wide variety of AI solutions. The issue faced by data center partners including hyperscalers, neoclouds, co-location providers, enterprise users, and technology providers is that siloed efforts produce competing design requirements that slows innovations and extends deployment timelines. The goal is to identify and specify requirements for AI data centers such that the physical infrastructure common ground enables fungibility for a diverse AI IT infrastructure, especially while aspects of the AI IT elements are rapidly evolving. This will enable colocation data center providers to support a wider range of tenants with fewer customizations.
“The OCP Community’s vision of the open data center ecosystem continues to enable solving the challenges of building at-scale AI clusters and the infrastructure that houses them. We are continuing to utilize OCP’s open, collaborative, and unique value proposition and its large community and ecosystem to develop open specifications and standards that address the bottlenecks that threaten to constrain the future of AI growth. We firmly believe OCP’s role in fostering development of open, standardized, sustainable, and scalable infrastructure to be increasingly vital to the industry and its supply chain enabling it to deliver on AI’s transformative potential cost effectively and with faster TTM, while managing its environmental impact,” said George Tchaparian, CEO at the Open Compute Project Foundation.
The Open Data Center for AI SI will be able to build on several work efforts already underway within the OCP Community
- The new Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) Project covering integration of facilities’ technology cooling systems and facility water systems into IT rack liquid cooling
- a facilities-level Power Distribution Project covering transition to a Direct Current distribution architecture that support high-powered IT rack.
Other notable and recent contributions include
- Mt Diablo (Diablo 400) power-rack sidecar for powering AI clusters, co-authored by Google, Meta and Microsoft; Deschutes Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU), authored by Google;
- Clemente, for high-performance AI compute trays, authored by Meta;
- and Hyperscale CPU RAS and Debug Requirements for standardized debug capabilities for CPUs in hyperscale environments, co-authored by AMD, Google and Microsoft.
The Diablo specification by Google, Meta and Microsoft describes a disaggregated power rack, or sidecar rack, pushing power delivery from today’s 48 volts direct current (VDC) within the rack to either +/-400 VDC or 800VDC. The Diablo specification defines power solutions for high-density AI racks, enabling IT racks from 100 kilowatts up to 1 megawatt. More than simply increasing power delivery capacity, selecting 400 VDC as the nominal voltage leverages the supply chain established by electric vehicles, for greater economies of scale, proven quality, and more efficient manufacturing, by standardizing the electrical and mechanical interfaces.
The Deschutes CDU is targeted to support ~2 MW heat loads, with hydraulic capacity targets of 500 GPM at 80-90 psi, which would be among the highest CDU thermal capacities available in the industry. It promises to enhance thermal management and operational efficiency. The specification will enable any CDU supplier in the industry to develop, manufacture and improve upon the design. The CDU is assembled from components that are sourced from multiple vendors that are widely known in the industry, allowing vendors to build and data center owners to be able purchase a CDU based on this specification. Beyond supply chain considerations, installation and maintenance procedures are shared to enable fast deployments of reliable equipment.
The Clemente specification describes a 1RU tall compute tray which integrates two NVIDIA GB300 Host Processor Modules (HPM) into a form factor with peripherals that support Meta’s AI/ML training and inference use cases. It also represents a milestone of a first deployment of a design that uses OCP ORv3 HPR (in-progress specification contribution) with side car power racks. The platform includes both air cooled and liquid cooled components. CPU, GPU and switch will be liquid cooled, with the remaining components air cooled.
OCP’s above Open Systems for AI efforts continue to solidify OCP as the premiere open organization accelerating deployment of AI data centers. These resources and more are collected on OCP’s newly opened AI portal on the OCP Marketplace, providing one location for AI cluster designers, builders and facility providers to find the latest available AI infrastructure products and reference material.
“With the AI infrastructure market moving very fast, there is a risk of higher costs due to fragmentations. It is the right time for an organization like the OCP to be facilitating a community to determine commonalities in data center facilities and IT Infrastructure that can help accelerate the market for future generations of AI cluster deployments and data center facility builds,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst, 650 Group.
About the Open Compute Project Foundation
The Open Compute Project (OCP) brings at-scale innovations and hyperscaler best practices to all, spanning technology domains from the data center to the edge, and the technology stack from silicon, to systems, to site facilities and services. The international OCP Community is made up of organizations and people from hyperscale and tier-2 cloud data center operators, communications providers, colocation providers, diverse enterprises, and technology vendors. With the tenets of openness, impact, efficiency, scale and sustainability, the OCP engages and educates thousands of engineers every year. Across many projects and initiatives, the OCP Foundation and Community are meeting the market today and shaping the future.
Learn more at: www.opencompute.org.
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