NVIDIA expanded influence as Ethernet overtook InfiniBand

NVIDIA’s expanded influence after its Mellanox acquisition coincided with Ethernet overtaking InfiniBand in data center switch and server port counts, a development referenced in industry reports and vendor briefings.

Industry research and analyst commentary traced the shift from InfiniBand — which held about an 80% share of the data center switch market in 2023 — to Ethernet leadership in subsequent port and switch counts, and a July 2025 Dell’Oro Group study projected cumulative data center switch revenue approaching $80 billion over the following five years, driven largely by Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure investment.

Technical deployments in 2026 spanned multiple speed tiers: 100G, 200G, 400G, and 800G were the primary server- and fabric-facing rates, while 1.6T began appearing for early spine and inter-cluster links; server-to-leaf links often used 100G/200G 4-lane PAM4 variants and many racks moved to 400G using 8-lane 50 Gb/s PAM4 form factors, and leaf-to-spine links relied on 400G with growing 800G deployments and standards work toward 200 Gb/s per lane under IEEE 802.3dj.

Vendor activity reflected those deployments: NVIDIA paired Spectrum‑4 and Spectrum‑X switches with H100/H200/Blackwell-class Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters and BlueField DPUs; Arista emphasized 100G–800G leaf-spine fabrics and its Earth Observation Satellite (EOS) software; Cisco continued to supply Nexus 9000/7000 and Silicon One designs; HPE’s 2025 acquisition of Juniper was described as strengthening its switching and security fabric portfolio; Huawei offered CloudEngine switches; and white-box/ODM suppliers such as Quanta, Celestica, and Inspur Radio Access Network (RAN) SONiC-style Network Optimization Suite (NOS) stacks.

IDC reported ODM-direct sales into data centers grew over 150% year-on-year in 3Q25, white-box switch market studies projected roughly $3.2–3.5 billion in 2025 with a ~12–13% Compound Annual Growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, and HPE’s Slingshot supplied interconnects for multiple Top500 systems in 2025.