Cisco Announces G302 Silicon and USFP Optics With NVIDIA at OCP 2026

What happened

Cisco unveiled new networking silicon, systems and optics for open AI infrastructure at the OCP Global Summit 2026 in San Jose on October 12, 2026, including a 51.2T top-of-rack switching chip, a new out-of-band management system, and a planned 400Gb/s-per-lane pluggable optics module designed with NVIDIA. Kevin Wollenweber, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of data center and internet infrastructure, said AI is changing what it means to scale infrastructure, shifting the focus from individual data centers or clusters to how compute is connected at massive scale while performance and resilience are preserved. Cisco is a networking hardware and infrastructure platform company based in San Jose. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara.

Scale-Across Architecture and P200 Production Cisco’s scale-across work targets AI jobs that run across multiple facilities rather than inside a single site. The approach builds on conventional data center interconnect technology, but the workload demands differ: when accelerators across sites share one coordinated job, congestion, latency (the delay between asking for something and getting it) and recovery can directly affect compute utilization and job progress. To address this, Cisco pairs its Silicon One P200 with deep-buffered systems and coherent optics, connecting AI fabrics in different locations so they operate as one unified cluster.