Open designs gain ground in AI data centers at OCP Korea

The Open Compute Project Foundation and OCP Korea Community hosted 2026 OCP Korea Tech Day on the 21st at COEX in Seoul, drawing approximately 1,500 attendees from industry, academia, research institutions and government in South Korea and abroad. The event, now in its eighth year, included more than 60 sessions and over 30 exhibition booths covering AI infrastructure, edge computing, cloud platforms, semiconductors, data center design, servers, storage, networking, memory and cooling.

OCP is moving from open hardware components toward open deployment methods for complete AI clusters, as rising chip performance and power consumption force changes across racks, power delivery and cooling. Nvidia has contributed its MGX rack design, while Meta and AMD are expanding the 42-inch Open Rack Wide ecosystem. Google’s coolant distribution unit design, validated across five generations in its own data centers, led to products from eight suppliers after release to OCP. OpenAI, Microsoft, Intel and AMD have also released MRC, a multi-path networking technology validated in OpenAI’s large-scale AI clusters.

The push is set to continue at Hot Chips, held from August 23 to 25 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. IBM, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung Electronics, Micron, SK Hynix, Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are scheduled to present new processor, accelerator, GPU, memory, networking or chip design technologies.