BOSTON (February 2, 2026) – Research firm Cignal AI substantially raised its outlook last week for the Optical Circuit Switch (OCS) market following new analysis of Google’s TPU-based AI deployments, as shown in its recently released Optical Circuit Switching Forecast Update Active Insight report.
The revised forecast reflects a much larger total OCS opportunity than previously expected, driven primarily by Google’s accelerated rollout of TPU-based AI clusters. Cignal AI now projects that the 2026 addressable market is roughly three times larger than its earlier estimate, with the 2029 outlook more than 40 percent higher than the forecast published in December.
“Google’s TPU-based AI architecture is creating an OCS market that is both larger and more concentrated than we anticipated,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst at Cignal AI. “The overall opportunity is clearly in multi-billion-dollar territory, but most near-term spend will remain captive to Google’s internal designs, with a smaller but rapidly growing portion available to third-party vendors.”
Additional Details Behind the Update:
- The updated forecast incorporates the latest estimates unit pricing and Google’s TPU deployments and associated OCS requirements, leading to significantly higher expectations for OCS demand in 2025-2026.
- Most OCS deployments through the end of the decade are expected to remain concentrated in Google’s AI Cluster Reconfiguration application, with limited adoption in AI scale-up networks and GPU-based architectures before 2029.
- While Google’s internal builds will account for the majority of OCS ports in the near term, a growing but supply constrained share of demand will be addressable by external vendors as Google qualifies additional suppliers.
- OCS deployments outside of Google remain at the proof-of-concept and early trial stage, particularly for GPU-based AI networks where migration to OCS is more complex; broader, multi-operator adoption is expected to build gradually rather than in a single step-function.
About Active Insight Reports
The 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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