NVIDIA has announced its groundbreaking NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ and NVIDIA Quantum-X silicon photonics networking switches, poised to revolutionize AI infrastructure by enabling AI factories to interconnect millions of GPUs across vast distances. This innovative approach significantly reduces energy consumption and operational costs, marking a major milestone in the fusion of electronic circuits and optical communications at a massive scale.

Redefining AI Infrastructure

As AI models and data centers continue to scale exponentially, traditional networking solutions struggle to keep pace. NVIDIA's photonics switches offer a cutting-edge solution, integrating optical innovations that deliver 3.5x more power efficiency, 63x greater signal integrity, 10x better network resiliency, and 1.3x faster deployment than conventional methods.

AI factories are a new class of data centers with extreme scale, and networking infrastructure must be reinvented to keep pace, By integrating silicon photonics directly into switches, NVIDIA is shattering the old limitations of hyperscale and enterprise networks and opening the gate to million-GPU AI factories.

said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

Spectrum-X and Quantum-X Platforms

NVIDIA's silicon photonics networking switches are available within the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet and NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand platforms:

NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet: Delivers 1.6x higher bandwidth density compared to traditional Ethernet, making it ideal for multi-tenant, hyperscale AI factories. Configurations include options for 128 ports of 800Gb/s or 512 ports of 200Gb/s, providing up to 100Tb/s of total bandwidth. Enhanced versions offer 512 ports of 800Gb/s or 2,048 ports of 200Gb/s, resulting in a 400Tb/s total throughput.

NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand: Features 144 ports of 800Gb/s InfiniBand, leveraging 200Gb/s SerDes and a liquid-cooled design for efficient heat dissipation. It delivers 2x faster speeds and 5x higher scalability for AI compute fabrics compared to the previous generation.

Collaboration and Ecosystem

NVIDIA's silicon photonics ecosystem includes industry leaders such as TSMC, Browave, Coherent, Corning Incorporated, Fabrinet, Foxconn, Lumentum, SENKO, SPIL, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and TFC Communication.

A new wave of AI factories requires efficiency and minimal maintenance to achieve the scale required for next-generation workloads, TSMC’s silicon photonics solution combines our strengths in both cutting-edge chip manufacturing and TSMC-SoIC 3D chip stacking to help NVIDIA unlock an AI factory’s ability to scale to a million GPUs and beyond, pushing the boundaries of AI.

 C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC

Availability

NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand switches are expected to be available later this year, while NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet switches are slated for release in 2026 through leading infrastructure and system vendors.