AI networking startups race to replace Nvidia's NVLink

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As Nvidia expands its influence through its NVLink Fusion tech, rival networking vendors are scrambling to bring alternative interconnects and switches to market.

At the AI Infra Summit this week, Delos Data and Cornelis Networks officially entered the scale up networking race.

Scale-up fabrics, like NVLink, are what have allowed Nvidia to make eight, 72, and now 576 GPUs behave as one enormous AI accelerator. To catch up, rivals like AMD have embraced emerging protocols like Ultra Accelerator Link.

Today, these protocols are largely being tunneled over standard Ethernet switches. For instance, AMD is using Broadcom’s 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6-based switches connecting to custom I/O dies on the MI455X.

Purpose-built UALink switches and physical interconnects remain elusive, but that won’t be the case for long if Cornelis and Delos have their way.

The two companies are approaching this challenge from a few different angles, including standardization, software optimization,...

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