Nvidia and partners pour billions into next-gen optical circuit switching for AI racks
Nvidia has invested billions in photonics firms and, together with Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, is adding $125 million to fund iPronics' second-generation optical circuit switching technology.
Nvidia’s latest funding moves include a $6 billion investment split between Coherent, Lumentum and Marvell to accelerate optical components for AI accelerators. In addition, the firm joined Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital in a $125 million commitment to develop iPronics' second-generation optical circuit switching (OCS) platform, which abandons moving-part MEMS in favor of silicon photonics with sub-millisecond switching times. iPronics plans to introduce 32-port chips now and scale to 72- and 144-port versions, targeting a rack-level density of up to 720 port pairs, a stark contrast to existing 300-port OCS appliances that occupy multiple rack units.
The technology is suited for AI clusters that benefit from stable, low-latency mesh topologies, such as Nvidia’s large-scale LPU racks. To support the required fiber connectivity, Mixx Technologies launched its SxC connector, capable of handling 64 fibers per port and fitting 384 ports into a single OCP rack unit, delivering up to 614 TB/s of bandwidth at 400 Gbps per lane.
Why it matters
Advances in optical switching could enable far denser, faster AI supercomputers, reshaping data-center design and performance.
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