Topic
Switches, optics and fabrics that connect accelerators in AI training and inference clusters, both within racks (scale-up) and across racks (scale-out).
Cisco told the Open Compute Project summit that its 102.4-terabit Silicon One G300 is now shipping to customers at volume. Buyers can order against those dates. The optics module Cisco showed with Nvidia rests on Cisco's own bandwidth claims.
Reality
NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans for USFP, a pluggable optic with 400Gb/s per lane and a stated ceiling of 12.8Tb/s per module. The first planned modules have 16 lanes, or 6.4Tb/s each way, so the ceiling needs 32 lanes or a two-way count.
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Nvidia said at the OCP summit that Google and Meta will adopt its Spectrum-X and related networking gear. Google's named products are narrower than that description, so the announcement shows less about Nvidia's network position than its lead sentence suggests.
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Meta, Microsoft and Alibaba co-lead OSPA, a new OCP initiative whose switch-platform specification v1.0 has been submitted to OCP. MetaRoCE now has open-source implementations; the rack and fabric designs are described, with release terms unstated.
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Four companies, Nvidia and Cisco among them, have introduced a new pluggable optics form factor for AI data centers, cryptobriefing.com reported. Nvidia also sells the co-packaged alternative, and the evidence that supplier lists will change is thin.
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Upscale's Token Fabric puts its SkyFabriX scale-up silicon and Nvidia Spectrum-X scale-out switches under one network OS, due in early 2027. For planners, the open question is whether one management layer holds across two suppliers' chips and two traffic regimes.
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Arista's Etherlink SU-144 links up to 144 accelerators in one Ethernet hop and 1,024 across racks, built on the ESUN initiative. Arista says Nvidia-based racks stay on proprietary NVLink for now, so the open choice belongs to buyers of other accelerators.
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HPE booked a $1.2 billion Vultr order, its first for AMD's Helios platform, and raised its fiscal 2027 networking growth outlook. Executives say supply now limits sales, so the test is whether HPE can turn backlog into revenue at the higher margins it promises after the Juniper deal.
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HPE now expects networking revenue to grow in the high teens to low 20s percent in fiscal 2027, up from the 14% to 17% it guided on its last earnings call. For enterprise buyers, the plan leans on AI data center racks sold whole and reaches campus accounts through a sales force that sells the full catalog.
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PicoJool, the Gelsinger-backed optics startup, raised a $27.5 million Series A to get its VCSEL links for AI data centers qualified with customers. For operators, that means a new low-power option to put through trials, with volume supply still at the planning stage.
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Tower Semiconductor and Japan will co-invest $4 billion to reach 45,000 300mm-equivalent wafers a month of optical-connectivity capacity by 2029. Until the new fab lands in 2029, growth comes from adding tools to a fab that already ships.
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The startup's switches would route rack-to-rack traffic without converting light into electricity at every hop, and the sub-microsecond reconfiguration number it quotes is a target in its YC launch materials.
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