NVIDIA and Cisco unveil USFP optics for AI factories

What happened

NVIDIA and Cisco unveil USFP optics for AI factories News | October 21, 2026 By Asma Adhimi CISCO Nvidia NVIDIA and Cisco have teamed up to develop Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new optical transceiver form factor designed to support 400 Gb/s-per-lane connectivity in next-generation AI factories. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara. Cisco is an infrastructure platform and telecommunications company based in San Jose, and its products and services include network switches.

The first planned transceivers will integrate 16 full-duplex lanes into an OSFP-sized footprint, supporting both switches and SuperNICs. NVIDIA and Cisco have teamed up to develop Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), a new optical transceiver form factor designed to support 400 Gb/s-per-lane connectivity in next-generation AI factories.

The technology promises four times the bandwidth density of current 200 Gb/s-per-lane pluggable optics, with improved power efficiency and capacity of up to 12.8 Tb/s. The development is significant for European data center (a building full of computers that runs online services) operators, network equipment makers and optical component suppliers looking to scale AI infrastructure without increasing network complexity or power consumption.

It also opens up opportunities for connectivity manufacturers as the industry moves toward higher-density Ethernet networks. Four times the bandwidth density USFP is designed to help AI infrastructure operators connect more computing systems within the same network footprint, avoiding the additional switching layers that can increase latency, costs and power consumption.