Meta, Microsoft and Alibaba are backing a new Open Compute Project effort to standardize a part of network switches that has remained surprisingly proprietary: the platform layer beneath the network operating system.
The project is called Open Switch Platform Architecture, or OSPA. OCP says the proposed Revision 1.0.0 candidate is still under Foundation review, so this is not yet a finished industry standard. The goal is to create a vendor-neutral reference architecture that lets switch hardware and software reuse the same platform interfaces instead of rebuilding them for every new hardware SKU.
The distinction matters. Technologies such as OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface already help make forwarding software portable across different switch silicon. OSPA targets the layer below that: the hardware-management functions needed to bring a switch up, monitor it, update it and recover it when something breaks.
Meta engineering director Omar Baldonado explains the company’s case for full-stack, open AI networking at OCP 2026.
OSPA defines common guidance across seven areas: power management, hardware access, inventory, environmental monitoring and control, firmware maintenance and recovery, debuggability, and security. OCP also describes an in-host management model in which platform services run primarily on the host, while the baseboard management controller is reserved for essential supervisory tasks such as power sequencing, host recovery, leak protection and troubleshooting.
That is especially relevant as AI networking hardware changes faster. BitcoinVersus.Tech recently covered Meta’s 102.4 Tb/s liquid-cooled IcePack and IceCube network platform. Meta says each new proprietary platform can otherwise require months of duplicated engineering before the operating system and management stack are ready.
Meta Open Source is the company’s public channel for open-source engineering work, the same broader ecosystem OSPA is designed to extend into switch-platform management.
The OSPA effort also includes input from Accton, Arista, Celestica, Cisco, DTI, Micas, Nexthop, NVIDIA and Wistron. OCP says the specification is being developed through public review and open meetings, with contributions governed under the Modified Open Web Foundation Agreement 0.9.
BitcoinVersus.Tech’s latest OCP coverage shows why standardization is becoming more valuable. IDC now projects OCP-recognized infrastructure spending could reach $892 billion by 2030, while AI racks are demanding faster networking, higher voltages and liquid cooling.
Meta infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan discusses engineering AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale during the 2026 OCP Global Summit.
OSPA does not standardize routing protocols or packet forwarding. Those remain outside its scope. Instead, it tries to make the physical switch platform behave predictably enough that operators and network operating systems can move across hardware with less custom integration.
That complements other open-networking work already moving through OCP. BitcoinVersus.Tech recently covered new 12.8 Tb/s pluggable optics planned for AI networks, another example of the industry opening interfaces that were previously tightly coupled to individual platforms.
The practical test for OSPA will be adoption. If switch vendors implement the same management architecture across multiple systems, operators could onboard new hardware faster and reuse more software. If vendors continue exposing incompatible platform layers, the specification may remain mostly a reference document. For now, OSPA is a serious attempt to remove one more proprietary boundary from the AI data-center network.
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