NVIDIA Corporation and Cisco Develop USFP Optical Module Standard

NVIDIA Corporation and Cisco have partnered to develop the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new optical module format designed to scale AI factories. The USFP supports 400Gb/s-per-lane electrical signals and up to 32 electrical lanes, enabling total capacities of 12.8Tb/s per connection. This design provides four times the bandwidth density of 200Gb/s-per-lane modules and approximately 1.3 times the power efficiency, allowing operators to increase compute scale without adding network tiers.

To accelerate industry adoption, the companies plan to publish an open multi-source specification for the technology. Initial product offerings will feature 16 lanes with 6.4Tb/s capacity, integrating with Cisco's Silicon One-based Ethernet networks and the NVIDIA Corporation Spectrum-X ecosystem.

At the Open Compute Project Global Summit, NVIDIA Corporation further expanded its AI infrastructure efforts by contributing Vera Rubin rack and compute tray designs to the Open Compute Project. The company also announced partnerships with Google LLC to integrate Falcon Transport into the Spectrum-X ecosystem and Meta Platforms Inc., which is adopting the Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch for its next-generation AI factory network.