As AI factories grow from megawatts to gigawatts, building them takes more than advanced computing. Open standards are helping the industry scale AI infrastructure faster, more efficiently and more reliably.
At the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit yesterday, Nvidia announced new partnerships and contributions aimed at creating a common foundation for next-generation AI infrastructure.
Nvidia contributed key Nvidia Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs to OCP through the open Nvidia MGX architecture, giving system builders a common foundation for developing next-generation AI factory infrastructure.
Together, these efforts span the AI factory itself, the utility grid that powers it and the rack-scale architecture at the heart of modern accelerated computing.
Nvidia and partners announce open architecture advances
At the OCP event, Nvidia and partners made a handful of announcements:
- Nvidia and hyperscalers published open standards for next-generation AI factories, including AI factory design standards and grid resilience.
- Nvidia launched new open source software components for Nvidia DSX AI Factory.
- Meta and Nvidia advanced open AI networking with Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet SuperNIC and Spectrum-6 innovations.
- Visionbay introduced an 800V DC AI factory design for the Vera Rubin era.
- Nvidia and Cisco announced the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) standard, the industry’s first module for 400Gb/s-based networking fabrics.
- Nvidia and Google announced Falcon Transport support on future Nvidia ConnectX-10 SuperNICs and BlueField DPUs.
Vera Rubin AI factories advance with MGX rack contributions
Nvidia joined industry leaders in contributing to the third-generation MGX AI data center reference design through OCP’s Open DC Initiative.
Combined with open liquid-cooling technologies such as MQD and MQDB, the effort helps turn proven AI factory designs into industry standards that others can adopt, manufacture and scale.
For Nvidia Vera Rubin AI factories, the updated MGX 1.2 specification extends the open architecture for AI factories with rack-scale blind-mate liquid cooling, interoperable rack-scale interconnect infrastructure and a liquid-cooled 5 000A busbar designed for higher-power AI systems. It also adds native 19-inch equipment support and higher-density rack designs.
MGX 1.2 further expands modularity with configurable I/O bays, fanless liquid-cooled compute trays, standardized power and cooling interfaces, and a common infrastructure that helps ecosystem partners build interoperable accelerated computing platforms. It improves assembly, test and service times to streamline manufacturing and field service to enable faster and more efficient infrastructure buildout. The architecture supports rack deployments up to 250kW while simplifying serviceability, deployment and infrastructure reuse.
The Vera CPU rack design specification extends the Nvidia MGX open architecture beyond accelerated computing, providing a purpose-built platform for the growing agentic AI era. While Vera Rubin NVL72 serves as the foundation for large-scale training and inference, the Nvidia Vera CPU rack is designed to support tool calling, orchestration and sandboxed execution, helping AI agents interact with applications, data and services in real time.
Built on the third-generation Nvidia MGX rack architecture, the Vera CPU rack shares the same rack-scale design principles that unite compute, networking, power and cooling into a common modular platform. This approach enables partners to deploy specialised infrastructure while benefiting from a shared ecosystem, simplified integration and a consistent foundation for next-generation AI factories.
Nvidia Launches New Open Source Software Components for DSX AI Factory
Nvidia DSX AI factory platform applies extreme codesign to unify computing, networking, power, cooling, facilities and software, helping AI factories operate as a single optimized system, maximizing AI output within available infrastructure constraints. At the center of this unified system is DSX OS, the open operating layer that turns the DSX architecture into coordinated, repeatable operations at scale.
At OCP, Nvidia expanded DSX OS with open source components for configuring networks, validating clusters, managing racks and provisioning bare metal:
- Nvidia Config Manager: Automates switch configurations at scale, allowing customers to deploy, validate and maintain consistent AI factory network fabrics with minimal to zero manual intervention/
- Nvidia Cluster Readiness Engine: Helps eliminate costly job crashes by stress-testing GPU clusters with real workload simulations to guarantee hardware health before training begins
- Nvidia Rack Management Service: Offers a rack hardware abstraction and operations solutions that treats racks as first-class units for improved AI factory scale firmware management.
- Cluster API Provider for Nvidia Infrastructure Controller: Accelerates bare-metal deployment and tenant onboarding, turning raw AI hardware into production-ready clusters in hours instead of days.
Developed from Nvidia’s experience running Nvidia DGX Cloud, these open source components enable cloud providers and software partners to integrate AI factory capabilities directly into their multi-tenant platforms.
Nvidia and hyperscalers publish open standards for next-generation AI factories
For AI infrastructure to scale globally, it needs more than advanced hardware — it needs a common foundation that the entire industry can build on.
At OCP, Nvidia joined AMD, Google and Meta to publish a new open specification that establishes that foundation. The Open Data Centre Specification v0.7 defines a unified blueprint for next-generation AI factory facility design — from power architecture to cooling infrastructure to physical layout.
The OCP Grid Resilience Specification, published by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, establishes how large-scale AI infrastructure should behave during utility grid disturbances: staying connected, responding automatically and restoring to near-full load within less than two seconds.
With these standards now open, manufacturers around the world have a common target to build for. Equipment makers, colocation providers and data center operators can begin designing, fabricating and delivering the infrastructure layer that powers AI factories under construction globally — without waiting for proprietary specifications from individual customers.
Being Nvidia DSX reference design-compatible, these specifications provide a validated, deployable implementation of both specs, from facility layout and power architecture to the software that monitors and responds to grid signals in real time. For operators building Vera Rubin AI factories, there’s now a straight line from open community standard to a running system.