2026 OCP Summit: Full-Stack AI Networking Silicon from Nvidia/Cisco and Broadcom; Ethernet vs InfiniBand Interconnects
Executive Summary:
At the 2026 Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose, CA this week, the multi-vendor push for open, gigawatt-scale AI networks reached a critical tipping point as Cisco and Broadcom deployed massive 102.4 Tbps Ethernet fabrics to challenge Nvidia’s proprietary grip. These and other networking silicon companies are responding to what Cisco executives call a new “Network Supercycle” triggered by agentic AI workloads. The architectural battle lines for gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure were drawn between open ecosystems and proprietary stacks. Broadcom championed the open alternative by introducing its 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6 switching platform and third-generation TH6-Davisson Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) to drastically reduce power consumption across clusters exceeding 100,000 accelerators.
- Cisco accelerated this so called “Network Supercycle” by highlighting massive hyperscaler traction for its custom Silicon One P200 routing chips, which Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud have integrated into their custom architectures to handle dense, geographically distributed AI workloads.
- Nvidia defended its market dominance with its Quantum-3 InfiniBand switches and native sub-2µs point-to-point latency; however, despite InfiniBand technically originating as an open industry standard, Nvidia’s sole manufacturing monopoly, closed software integration with CUDA, and proprietary extensions like SHARP have effectively turned it into a vertically locked, high-premium ecosystem. This strict architectural division has forced hyperscalers to choose between the seamless, turnkey acceleration of Nvidia’s proprietary pipeline for tight scale-up GPU environments, or the superior multi-vendor economics, flexibility, and anti-lock-in guardrails offered by Broadcom and Cisco’s open Ethernet frameworks.
- Broadcom launched an open Ethernet fabric architecture designed for gigawatt-scale clusters scaling past 100,000 parallel AI accelerators, showcasing innovations like the 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6 and Jericho 4 silicon. The company also introduced TH6-Davisson Co-Packaged Optics, Thor Ultra 800G NICs, and Open Rack Version 3 blueprints to compete with proprietary InfiniBand stacks. You can read more about Broadcom’s announcements at the official corporate site.
I. Cisco has worked with Nvidia on an Ultra-Dense Small Form-Factor Pluggable (USFP), a transceiver that conforms to the Octal Small Form-Factor Pluggable (OSFP) footprint that governs most high-speed datacenter transceivers today. Cisco said USFP enables the industry to accelerate AI by building on the ecosystem models that have powered today’s AI networks. By combining a path to higher-capacity fabrics and improved efficiency with familiar operational practices, USFP helps customers scale AI infrastructure while maintaining the flexibility, interoperability, and consistency required at scale.
Unlike other optical transceivers, the leading versions of which are designed to handle 200-Gb/s today, USFP provides 400-Gb/s full-duplex data rates over 16 lanes with 32 in the future, achieving transmission rates from 6.4 Tb/s up to 12.8 Tb/s. Nvidia said scalability is facilitated by an internal connector technology that reduces wear and improves signal integrity. USFP works with switches and SmartNICs. The new USFP is designed to save power without requiring liquid cooling, something that other solutions feature—most notably Arista Network’s eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics (XPO) solution, which packs its own liquid-cooled cold plate.
Cisco and NVIDIA claim that, compared to an OSFP module supporting 200-Gb/s, the new USFP has approximately 1.3X the power efficiency. At the same time, the USFP matches the footprint of today’s OSFP transceivers, making for an easier transition than the new form-factor XPO, which Arista says improves density by a factor of 4X. The two companies said they’ll work with a “community-led multi-source project” to create an open industry specification for USFP. Members of that “community” were not identified. 
Source: NVIDIA and Cisco
In a blogpost, Cisco executives Bill Gartner, SVP and GM, Optical Systems and Optics, and Will Eatherton, SVP Networking Engineering, stated:
“To help customers scale AI infrastructure efficiently and sustainably, Cisco takes a full-stack, co-designed platform approach that combines silicon, high-density systems, optics, software, and operational expertise. USFP reflects that philosophy. Rather than a standalone innovation, it is part of a broader platform vision that advances scale, efficiency, and performance while preserving the deployment, serviceability, and lifecycle models customers depend on.”
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Cisco also highlighted massive cloud traction for its custom Silicon One P200 routing chip, which provides 51.2 Tb/s of high-buffering switching capacity designed to seamlessly link vast, geographically distributed AI data sites. Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud.
“As our infrastructure demands grow, the P200’s robust architecture provides the speed and enhanced buffering capabilities necessary to address the increasing scale of our cloud and high-performance services,” said Anand Ramakrishna, Corporate Vice President, Engineering, Microsoft, in a statement.
Alibaba has embedded the Silicon One P200 into its Quantum Cat router. “We paired Cisco’s silicon with Alibaba’s custom systems and the SONiC operating system,” stated Dennis Cai, Vice President, Head of Network Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group. “This combination … delivers the flexibility and operational power required for some of the world’s most demanding networks.”
Cisco also said that its previously announced 102.4-Tb/s Silicon One G300 is now available for customer sampling, with some G300-powered systems shipping to customers. Another chip, the 51.2-Gb/s G302, is designed to function at top-of-rack (ToR) deployments for scale up or scale across infrastructure.
Cisco’s OCP announcements indicate the networking market leader’s efforts to continue unifying its full-stack strategy around its own silicon, switching, and software, a tack that so far has proved successful.
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- Tomahawk 6 & Jericho 4 Silicon: Broadcom demonstrated live partner systems running its 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6 switching platform for low-latency frontend fabrics, alongside Jericho 4 silicon for deep-buffered scale-out routing.
- TH6-Davisson Co-Packaged Optics (CPO): This third-generation CPO architecture integrates optics directly onto the switch substrate. By eliminating internal copper traces to traditional transceivers, it drastically reduces power consumption per gigabit.
- Thor Ultra 800G NICs: These high-performance network interface cards support line-rate 800 Gbps RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) throughput, accelerating memory-to-memory data transfers while bypassing CPU overhead.
- ORV3 Ecosystem Blueprint: Broadcom aligned its PCIe Gen 6 switches, retimers, and optical components with the Open Rack Version 3 (ORV3) and Open Rack Wide standards, supporting dense liquid-cooled rack configurations.
- Open Standard Commitments: Under standardizing frameworks like ESUN (Ethernet for Scale-Up Networking), Broadcom pitched open Ethernet as the primary economic and physical alternative to proprietary InfiniBand fabrics for frontier AI clusters.
- Enterprise LAN and Client-to-Server Interconnects: Connects standard server racks to local networks, user devices, and the broader internet.
- Front-End Data Center Networks: Manages standard cloud computing workloads, database queries, and multi-tenant hosting environments.
- Emerging AI Backends (via RoCEv2): Through frameworks like the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) and platforms like NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X, modern 800Gbps Ethernet is increasingly deployed by hyperscalers (such as Meta and xAI) for AI clusters due to its superior Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and rapid innovation cycle.
- Ecosystem and TCO: Leverages a massive global supply chain and existing IT skills, avoiding the proprietary premium and single-vendor lock-in common with InfiniBand.
- RoCE Adaptability: Uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) along with Priority Flow Control (PFC) to emulate the low-latency, lossless advantages of InfiniBand over traditional network lines.
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- Header Optimization: Standard Ethernet headers carry massive protocol overhead that increases latency for small data frames. ESUN implements a streamlined, compact 4-byte ESUN Header (EH) to maximize packet efficiency, strip away unneeded bytes, and drastically lower transport latency.
- Lossless Reliability & Tail Latency Control: AI workloads depend heavily on synchronized “collective” mathematical operations where a single dropped packet can stall the entire training run. ESUN implements advanced Credit-Based Flow-Control (CBFC) to guarantee zero packet loss and tightly manage jitter and tail latency.
- Decoupled Multi-Vendor Interoperability: ESUN focuses strictly on how network switches and network interface cards (NICs) handle frame formatting and packet switching. By keeping the fabric protocol-agnostic, it allows accelerators to define their own host-side transport layers independently, allowing operators to mix-and-match silicon suppliers.
| Networking Initiative | Governing Body | Primary Focus | Role in the AI Ecosystem |
|---|---|---|---|
| ESUN | Open Compute Project (OCP) | Scale-Up Network Fabric (L2/L3 switching and framing) | Optimizes the actual network switches and packet formatting inside the physical rack. |
| SUE-T (Scale-Up Ethernet Transport) | Open Compute Project (OCP) | Scale-Up Endpoint Transport (XPU-to-XPU communication) | A specialized transport protocol layer designed to work natively inside the ESUN switch framework to handle load balancing and transaction scheduling. |
| UEC (Ultra Ethernet Consortium) | Linux Foundation | Data Center-Wide Networks (Initially Scale-Out, expanding to Scale-Up) | A broader, top-to-bottom architecture that ESUN actively pulls specifications and best practices from to align with global standards. |
III. Ethernet vs. InfiniBand for Interconnects:
The structural battle between Broadcom’s open Ethernet platform and Nvidia’s proprietary InfiniBand fabric [1.] are direct competitors for backend compute & storage interconnects in data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), and AI clusters within data centers. The technical architectures, advantages, and philosophies of both approaches contrast sharply.
Note 1. InfiniBand by itself is an open, industry-standard specification managed by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA). Nvidia acquired its primary architect, the Israeli company Mellanox, for $6.9 billion in 2019. However, in the context of modern AI data centers, Nvidia has effectively turned InfiniBand into a de facto proprietary ecosystem through vendor monopoly and closed optimizations. Here’s how that happened:
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- Vendor Monopoly: Nvidia is the sole manufacturer of AI-class InfiniBand silicon. Competitors like Intel abandoned the technology, while Broadcom and Cisco focus entirely on Ethernet.
- Proprietary Extensions: Nvidia injects closed-source hardware features like SHARP (which offloads AI math directly onto switches) that require a strict end-to-end Nvidia hardware pipeline.
- Software Lock-In: Management and orchestration tools are tightly bound to Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA and Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) stacks.
| Aspect | The Theoretical Standard | The Modern AI Reality |
|---|---|---|
| The Spec | Open, industry-standard managed by the IBTA. | Monopolized by a single vendor (Nvidia). |
| The Silicon | Anyone can build an InfiniBand chip. | Nvidia is the sole manufacturer of AI-class InfiniBand. |
| The Interconnect | Interoperable with various hardware platforms. | Tightly coupled with Nvidia GPUs and CUDA via proprietary extensions like SHARP. |
| Feature / Metric | Broadcom Open Ethernet Platform | Nvidia Proprietary InfiniBand Fabric |
|---|---|---|
| Architectural Philosophy | Open ecosystem. Decouples compute from networking to prevent vendor lock-in. | Vertically integrated. Tightly couples GPUs, switches, and software for a turn-key solution. |
| Top Raw Bandwidth | 102.4 Tbps single-chip switching capacity via Tomahawk 6. Supports native 800G per port. | 51.2 Tbps single-chip switching capacity on the latest Quantum-3 switches (400G per port). |
| Latency Profile | Average < 5µs using RoCE v2. Drops significantly via UEC 1.1 optimizations. | Native sub-2µs point-to-point latency with near-zero jitter. |
| Congestion & Reliability | Uses packet spraying, adaptive routing, and link-level retries via Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC). | Native credit-based flow control. Prevents buffer overflows at the hardware level for a completely lossless fabric. |
| Optical Integration | Leading the industry with Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) integrated onto the switch substrate. | Moving toward CPO integration in upcoming H2 2026 platform refreshes. |
| Relative Costs | Standard commoditized pricing. Roughly 1/3 the hardware cost of InfiniBand. | Premium pricing tied directly to Nvidia’s exclusive compute bundle. |
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References:
https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/cisco-shows-full-stack-networking-strategy-at-ocp/2026/10
https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-and-nvidia-announce-usfp-expanding-the-path-to-ai-connectivity
https://www.broadcom.com/company/news/resources/media-kits/2026-ocp-global-summit
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