Nvidia looks to silicon photonics to cut datacentre AI power
Nvidia has worked with foundry TSMC for high speed optical interconnect to reduce the power consumption of AI datacentres with millions of GPUs.
“We are announcing Nvidia’s first co packaged optics (CPO) silicon photonics system with 1.6Tbit/s performance based on micro ring resonator. This is a technology at TSMC which we have been working on for some time,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
“This is crazy technology,” he said. “We use this to go from the GPU to the switch to the next switch. Each one of these connects 100,000 GPUs with another 100,000, and so on, so every GPU will have six transceivers, adding 180W per GPU. So how do we scale up to millions of GPUs? That’s 6m transceivers with 180MW of power.”
The first version of the technology will be used later this year for a MultiRing Module (MRM) that will then be used in the Spectrum-X switch in the second half of 2026. This allows direct fibre connection into the switches with 512 ports of 800Gbit/s.
“This sets us up to scale up to multi million GPUs. Energy is the most important commodity for the AI datacentre so we invented the MRM,” said Huang.
This is built on the 6nm COUPE N6 process technology at TSMC with 3D CoWoS packaging and the design will be licensed to partners. These include TSMC, Browave, Coherent, Corning, Fabrinet, Foxconn, Lumentum, SENKO, SPIL, Sumitomo Electric Industries and TFC Communication.
- Nvidia has also worked with Broadcom on the technology
- Nvidia preps Blackwell Ultra, Vera Rubin chips
This saves energy to allow more racks of the next generation Rubin GPUs.
“We could save 10s of megawatts. 6MW is 10 Rubin Ultra racks – 60MW is 100 Rubin Ultra racks,” he said.
“A new wave of AI factories requires efficiency and minimal maintenance to achieve the scale required for next-generation workloads,” said C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC. “TSMC’s silicon photonics solution combines our strengths in both chip manufacturing and TSMC-SoIC 3D chip stacking to help NVIDIA unlock an AI factory’s ability to scale to a million GPUs and beyond, pushing the boundaries of AI.”
“The coming shift to CPO-based datacentre architectures is a major opportunity for Soitec’s advanced semiconductor materials, which already offer significant energy-efficiency and performance gains,” said Pierre Barnabé, CEO of French optical materials supplier Soitec.
“The latest industry initiatives and announcements show that momentum for widespread CPO adoption is building. This is further evidence that our strategic investments in innovation and technological diversification are paying off,” he said.
Soitec has just joined the SEMI Silicon Photonics Industry Alliance (SEMI SiPhIA), a group of more than 100 semiconductor industry partners, with TSMC and ASE serving as the alliance’s advocates.
The aim is to drive silicon photonics innovation and applications, advance industry standards, and foster knowledge-sharing, resource integration, and technical exchange.
The Spectrum-X Photonics switches include multiple configurations, including 128 ports of 800Gb/s or 512 ports of 200Gb/s, delivering 100Tb/s total bandwidth, as well as 512 ports of 800Gb/s or 2,048 ports of 200Gb/s, for a total throughput of 400Tb/s.
www.nvidia.com; www.soitec.com; www.tsmc.com
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