NVIDIA Announces Spectrum-X Photonics, an optoelectronic all-in-one packaged network switch, enabling AI factories to scale to millions of GPUs
March 18, 2025 — NVIDIA today unveiled NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ and NVIDIA Quantum-X silicon optical network switches, enabling AI factories to connect millions of GPUs across regions while dramatically reducing energy consumption and operating costs. NVIDIA enables the convergence of electronic circuits and optical communications on a large-scale platform.
As AI factories grow to unprecedented scale, networks must evolve to keep up. NVIDIA silicon photonics switches are the world's leading networking solutions. They innovatively integrate optics to reduce the number of lasers by a factor of 4, improve energy efficiency by up to 3.5x, improve signal integrity by up to 63x, increase reliability at scale by up to 10x, and increase deployment speed by up to 1.3x compared to traditional methods.
"AI factories are a new type of hyperscale data center that requires a new network infrastructure to keep up," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. "NVIDIA's integration of silicon photonics directly into the switch breaks down the old limitations of hyperscale and enterprise networks, opening the door to a million-GPU AI factory."
NVIDIA silicon photonics network switches will be used on the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet platform and the NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand platform.
The Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform delivers superior performance and 1.6x bandwidth density for multi-tenant, hyperscale AI factories, including the world's largest supercomputer, compared to traditional Ethernet.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics switches are available in a variety of configurations, including 128 x 800 Gb/s ports or 512 x 200 Gb/s ports for a total bandwidth of 100 Tb/s, and 512 x 800 Gb/s or 2,048 x 200 Gb/s ports for a total throughput of up to 400 Tb/s.
NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics switches offer 144 800Gb/s InfiniBand ports based on 200Gb/s SerDes and are liquid-cooled for efficient cooling of on-board silicon photonics. NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics switches are 2x faster and 5x scalable than the previous generation.
Network ecosystem
NVIDIA's silicon photonics ecosystem partners include TSMC, Browave, Coherent, Corning Incorporated, Fabrinet, Foxconn, Lumentum, SENKO, SPIL, Sumitomo Electric Industries, and TFC Communication.
"Next-generation AI factories require high efficiency and low maintenance costs to achieve the scale required for next-generation workloads," said Zhejia Wei, Chairman and CEO of TSMC. "TSMC's silicon photonics solutions combine the strengths of our advanced chip process with TSMC-SoIC 3D chip packaging to help NVIDIA unleash the capabilities of AI Factory, which can scale to 1 million GPUs and beyond, pushing the boundaries of AI."
NVIDIA photonics technology will drive massive growth in next-generation advanced AI factories, along with pluggable transceiver technology from industry leaders such as Coherent, Eoptolink, Fabrinet, and Innolight.
Availability
NVIDIA Quantum-X Photonics InfiniBand switches are expected to be available later this year, and in 2026, leading infrastructure and system vendors will introduce NVIDIA Spectrum-X Photonics Ethernet switches.