BOSTON (December 5, 2025) – The total market for Optical Circuit Switches (OCSs) will reach at least $2.5 billion by 2029 as AI and datacenter deployments expand beyond Google and into a broader set of operators and applications, according to market research firm Cignal AI’s latest Optical Circuit Switching Market report.
Historical spending estimates and the market forecast have each been revised upward since the previous OCS report (Jan 2025) and Cignal AI’s Optical Circuit Switching webinar in July, driven by new supplier data and a widening set of live trials.
The latest report notes that OCS use cases inside the datacenter are moving well beyond Google’s original applications. Operators are implementing and evaluating OCSs for scale-up and back-end networks, pooled and disaggregated resources, and campus datacenter interconnect, with reliability emerging as the defining requirement for AI-class deployments. Multiple technology approaches – MEMS, liquid crystal, piezoelectric, robotic, and silicon photonics – are all positioned to address different combinations of radix, speed, and loss.
“Over the past year, OCS in the datacenter has expanded from a singular Google project to a multi-vendor market with real deployments, purchase orders, and a credible path to multi-billion-dollar annual sales,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Optical Components at Cignal AI. “The revised forecast, the number of active vendors, and the breadth of operator evaluations make it clear that optical circuit switching will be a foundational technology for large-scale AI systems rather than a niche option.”
Additional Optical Circuit Switching Market Report Details
- Cignal AI forecasts the external OCS market to grow beyond $2.5 billion in 2029 – approximately 40% higher than the initial January 2025 forecast.
- Google has deployed tens of thousands of OCS ports for spine-layer replacement and AI cluster reconfiguration applications, but it is beginning to migrate from internally built OCSs to commercial solutions. Doing so opens a new multi-hundred-million-dollar opportunity for suppliers.
- Lumentum has provided public guidance to roughly $100 million per quarter in OCS revenue by the end of 2026, implying the company could account for around half of the OCS market next year if current trajectories hold.
- The report details the impact of OCSs on datacom transceivers, including requirements for extended span budgets (up to ~6 km budgets for OCS-interworked FR optics), bi-directional operation using circulators, and the likely shift in share from DR to FR that favors InP-based optics over silicon-photonics DR implementations.
About the Report
The 4Q25 Optical Circuit Switching Market report is part of Cignal AI’s Active Insight research service. The report defines and compares OCS technologies, analyzes key characteristics (reliability, radix, loss, and speed), maps technologies to specific AI and datacenter applications, reviews vendor offerings and roadmaps across 20 suppliers, and presents a quantitative market model and forecast through 2029 by application and technology. A full table of contents is available. Vendors in the report include Coherent, Lumentum, Huber+Suhner, Telescent, iPronics, DiCon, Triple-Stone, Calient, Drut, and multiple startups, with additional companies in stealth.
Active Insight market reports provide real-time reporting on important developments in the optical market, including detailed analysis of key product trends, show reports, summaries of quarterly earnings calls, and vendor reports. This market news service is included free of charge with subscriptions to Cignal AI’s Transport Hardware Report and Optical Component Report, and individual reports are available for purchase separately. You may view the archive of reports and enquire about purchasing Active Insight by contacting [email protected].
About Cignal AI
Cignal AI provides active and insightful market research for the networking component and equipment market and the market’s end customers. Our work blends expertise from a variety of disciplines to create a uniquely informed perspective on the evolution of networking communications.
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