NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) optics supporting 400 Gb/s per lane.

NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) optical modules for AI infrastructure networks. HPCwire describes the announcement as a planned high-density 400-gigabit-per-second-per-lane optical module, not an already completed network deployment.

The more detailed Telegram report describes support for 400 Gb/s electrical signaling per lane and up to 12.8 terabits per second per module. It reports four times the bandwidth density and 1.3 times the energy efficiency of existing 200-Gb/s-per-lane optical modules, preserving the comparison’s stated baseline.

The companies describe USFP as enabling more compute systems to be connected without adding network tiers, while reducing energy consumed per transmitted bit. NVIDIA and Cisco are working with TE Connectivity and Amphenol on a multisource hardware ecosystem; the supplied material does not specify commercial availability dates or customer deployment volumes.