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OCP Global Summit 2026 Pre-Show Read: Record Demand, AI in More Than Seven of Every Ten Releases, and a Calendar Built Around the Show

by Chris DePuy, 650 Group / October 6, 2026

The OCP Global Summit opens next week in San Jose, October 12–15, sold out for 2026, and the momentum behind the show keeps building. We have been counting the companies that time press releases around each major trade show, and the OCP arc is one of the cleanest growth stories on the calendar: show-named company releases went from 6 in 2023 to 12 in 2024 to 20 last year, and attendance climbed from 4,401 to 7,047 to 10,835 over the same stretch, roughly two and a half times in two years, per the show organizer’s own accounting. The pre-2024 readings run thin in the news archives we count from, so we treat those early numbers as floors rather than precise counts, but the direction is not in dispute.

Show-named company press releases per OCP Global Summit edition, 2022-2026
Show-named company press releases per edition. OCP 2026 is a pre-show snapshot. Source: 650 Group.

The show also keeps widening its AI footprint. In the releases issued so far for 2026, AI was in over 70 percent of them — 8 of 11 in our count — and the mix has shifted toward networking, which is running at 36 percent of the early releases versus 25 percent for all of 2025. The early flow is led by the SONiC Foundation welcoming new members to its growing AI networking ecosystem and the OIF showcasing its technical work advancing AI infrastructure. We expect the week-of-show flow to add the usual wave of server, rack, cooling, and power announcements on top of this list, and we will refresh the counts after the show closes. Here is the release list so far, in the order they landed:

The show itself is changing addresses after this year: beginning in 2027, the OCP Global Summit moves to the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, with the 2027 edition set for October 4–7. A sold-out San Jose run and a move to a larger venue is the classic signature of a show that outgrew its room.

We think the OCP Global Summit is one of the most important venues on the calendar for AI-related announcements. The evidence is in the timing: Lumentum put its summit sessions on the wire a full eleven days before the doors opened, companies are increasingly synchronizing their product announcements with the show, the same pattern we count at OFC and ECOC, and the pre-show release flow is starting earlier and carrying more AI content each year. For anyone tracking AI infrastructure — from power and cooling through scale-up networking — the release window around this summit has become a primary source, not a sideshow.

650 Group researches several of the technologies we covered in this blog, including AI Servers and Data Center Interconnect and more.

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Chris DePuy
Technology Analyst and co-founder of 650 Group