Nvidia · The Register
Nvidia embraces optical scale-up as copper passes limits
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If you thought Nvidia's GB200 rack systems were big, CEO Jensen Huang is getting started.
Key facts
- This helps to explain the $4 billion ($2 billion each) Nvidia plowed into Coherent and Lumentum, both companies specializing in optical lasers, last month
- As Huang noted in his 2024 GTC keynote speech, optics would have required an additional 20,000 watts of power
- As their sibling site The Next Platform discussed earlier this week, Marvell's $3.25 billion acquisition of Celestial AI could come into play here
- To reach the 1.8 TB/s of bandwidth, each Blackwell GPU would have required eighteen 800 Gbps pluggables: nine for the accelerator, and another nine for the switch
Summary
"For everyone who is in our ecosystem, we need a lot more capacity," Huang said during his GTC keynote speech. However, Nvidia's journey to this point began much earlier. At the time, the GPU giant's most potent systems only featured eight GPUs, and the models driving the AI boom required thousands to train. The team caught their first glimpse of this with Nvidia's Grace Hopper superchips in 2023, but it wasn’t until early 2024 that the full picture came into view.