Nvidia and Cisco unveil USFP optical interface with 400Gb/s per lane
Nvidia and Cisco announced USFP (Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable), a new optical transceiver interface for AI data centers, at the 2026 OCP Global Summit; Cisco says it is the first such interface to support 400Gb/s per lane, twice the current 200Gb/s-per-lane designs. The first modules are expected to use 16 full-duplex lanes in an octal small form factor footprint, giving a theoretical 6.4Tb/s total, with later designs expanding to 32 or more lanes and a planned 12.8Tb/s total that still requires further development and validation. The companies claim four times the bandwidth density of 200Gb/s-per-lane optics and about a 1.3x improvement in power efficiency, support for both switches and Nvidia SuperNIC adapters over RoCE, a two-step insertion design for signal integrity, and up to 100 watts of power dissipation without a dedicated internal cooling circuit; TE Connectivity and Amphenol are among partners building cages, connectors and modules.
Networking capacity is increasingly a bottleneck for scaling large AI clusters, so denser pluggable optics could let operators connect more GPUs and accelerators without rebuilding their network architecture.