Nvidia and Cisco announced plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new high-density 400Gb/s-per-lane optical module designed to equip the hardware ecosystem for the next generation of AI factories using pluggable transceivers.

As AI models grow and inference demand expands, AI factories must connect more computing systems while managing network complexity, power and costs. Moving more data per watt and per switch helps operators make better use of their infrastructure investments, Nvidia said.

Scaling AI factories requires more bandwidth per connection and more connections per switch. When a switch reaches its capacity, further network expansion can require additional switch layers and optical links, increasing latency, power consumption and costs.

In a press briefing, Joe DeLaere, senior manager of AI factory solutions at Nvidia said Nvidia is opening up the Vera Rubin architecture and will contribute to the open standards that will allow the industry to scale AI factories worldwide.

He said the Nvidia full stack AI factory platform is vertically integrated, but horizontally open.

“We contribute to the ecosystem at every layer of this platform. So at the top, we have more than 500 open models and 250 open datasets that we have contributed to the ecosystem. We also work with the ecosystem on compute software and frameworks.”

He said the company’s contributions today for the project “come from many generations of product experience across the entire stack, and overall, these contributions help the ecosystem accelerate AI factory buildout and increase AI productivity.

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