NVLink / NVSwitch
NVIDIA's GPU-to-GPU scale-up interconnect
NVLink is NVIDIA's proprietary high-bandwidth interconnect that ties GPUs together into a single scale-up domain; NVSwitch extends it across a chassis. In the GB200 NVL72 rack, fifth-gen NVLink delivers 1.8TB/s per GPU and unifies 72 Blackwell GPUs into one coherent NVLink domain (~130TB/s aggregate). NVLink Fusion (2025) opens the fabric to third-party CPUs/accelerators, deepening NVIDIA's platform lock-in as the scale-up standard.
5th-gen bandwidth
1.8TB/s per GPU
NVL72 domain
72 GPUs, ~130TB/s aggregate
NVLink Fusion
2025 opening to 3rd-party silicon
How it fits the stack
NVLink / NVSwitch with what it depends on (above) and what it feeds (below). The figure renders as a crawlable diagram and upgrades to an interactive 3D graph as it scrolls into view.
NVLink / NVSwitch in the AI stack. NVLink / NVSwitch with its immediate upstream dependencies (top) and downstream dependents (bottom) in the AI value chain. Hover a node in 3D, or read the full relationships below.
Graph data (text) — 6 entities, 6 relationships
- NCCL / RCCL collectives —depends on→ NVLink / NVSwitch
- Nvidia —uses→ NVLink / NVSwitch
- NVLink / NVSwitch —competes with→ Co-packaged optics & silicon photonics
- NVLink / NVSwitch —competes with→ UALink Consortium
- NVLink / NVSwitch —competes with→ Ultra Ethernet / UALink consortia
- NVLink / NVSwitch —designs→ Nvidia
Context — capital, rivals, policy · · 4