NVIDIA puts photonic AI switches into production

NVIDIA says its Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics platform has reached production, using co-packaged optics to deliver 5× better power efficiency and 5× sustained AI application runtime than pluggable-transceiver designs. The company’s silicon-photonics overview says the switch can reach 409.6 Tb/s and is designed for million-GPU AI factories, while NVIDIA’s engineering explanation describes a 512-lane, 200G-capable system. Infrastructure buyers should file the milestone as a networking-supply-chain signal, alongside the case for qualifying optical interconnects before a cluster locks in, not as proof that every workload will realize the vendor’s ratios.