The industry has been undergoing significant changes in computing. Application specific hardware acceleration is becoming commonplace and new memory technologies are influencing the economics of computing. To address the need for an open architecture to allow full industry participation, the OpenCAPI Consortium (OCC) was founded in 2016. The architecture that was defined allowed any microprocessor to attach to coherent user-level accelerators, advanced memories, and was agnostic to the processor architecture. In 2021, OCC announced the Open Memory Interface (OMI). Based on OpenCAPI, OMI is a serial attached near memory interface that provides low latency and high bandwidth connections for main memory.

In 2019, the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium was launched to deliver an industry-supported cache-coherent interconnect for processors, memory expansion, and accelerators. In 2020, the CXL and Gen-Z Consortiums announced plans to implement interoperability between their respective technologies, and in early 2022, Gen-Z transferred its specifications and assets to the CXL Consortium.