VALENCIA, Spain, and BARCELONA, Spain – iPronics, a pioneer in silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching for AI infrastructure, today announced a two-year strategic technology collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) focused on advancing programmable optical networking for next-generation GPU-based AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
For cloud providers and hyperscalers, integrating programmable optics has historically required custom software, but iPronics ONE changes that paradigm by offering a rack-ready, plug-and-play optical circuit switching architecture designed to integrate seamlessly into existing GPU environments. By demonstrating dynamic, workload-aware network control across hardware and software within BSC’s infrastructure, the strategic collaboration offers cloud providers and hyperscalers a clear path to maximizing GPU utilization, reducing latency, and lowering energy consumption without replacing their existing software stack.
“AI infrastructure is reaching a point where scaling compute also requires rethinking the network,” said Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics. “Networking needs to become more dynamic and more closely aligned with the behavior of AI workloads. Our strategic collaboration with BSC is an important milestone in bringing programmable optical networking deeper into the AI infrastructure stack.”
Bringing Hardware and Software Together to Advance AI Networks
A central focus of the collaboration is bringing optical hardware and software together as an integrated AI networking architecture. iPronics will provide its programmable optical switching platform, low-level software, and APIs, while BSC will develop software above the switch-management layer. Together, the teams are developing workload-aware networking approaches that align the communication requirements of AI applications with dynamically reconfigurable optical connectivity.
“As AI and HPC systems scale, the interconnect is becoming an increasingly important part of overall system architecture,” said Antonio J. Peña, Leading Researcher and Group Leader, Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación. “Our collaboration with iPronics gives us the opportunity to explore how programmable optical networking and the software stack can work together to support more dynamic and efficient computing infrastructures.”
iPronics’ programmable optical networking platform will be integrated within BSC’s research-class GPU and HPC infrastructure, creating an environment for the teams to advance networking approaches across AI training and inference, including Large Language Model (LLMs) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads. The collaboration will generate system-level insights to help inform the architecture of future AI infrastructure.
The BSC collaboration adds to iPronics’ strong market momentum following its recent $125 million Series B round, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, bringing the company’s total funding to $177 million. iPronics recently opened a U.S. office in Santa Clara, California, to expand its product strategy, customer deployments, and AI infrastructure partnerships.
