NVIDIA, Cisco unveil USFP pluggable optics spec for 400Gb/s AI fabrics
NVIDIA and Cisco announced Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), which they describe as the first pluggable optical module designed for 400Gb/s-per-lane electrical signals and capable of up to 12.8Tb/s total capacity. First planned transceivers pack 16 full-duplex lanes into an OSFP-sized footprint for switches and SuperNICs, with expansion to 32 or more lanes planned; the companies claim 4x bandwidth density and roughly 1.3x power efficiency versus 200Gb/s-per-lane pluggable modules. They are working with TE Connectivity and Amphenol on cages, connectors and modules, and plan an open industry specification through a community-led multi-source project.
Optical interconnect bandwidth and power efficiency shape how many accelerators an AI factory can link and at what energy cost, so this spec matters for scaling the next generation of training and inference clusters.