NIC · Network Interface Card
The server's network adapter. AI nodes carry multiple RDMA-capable high-speed NICs — often one per GPU — as the on-ramp to the scale-out fabric.
Also written as: NICs
Current numbers
~100 ns switch hop; ~1 us cited application examplefabric latency must name its measurement boundary: NVIDIA cites about 100 ns for an InfiniBand switch hop and about 1 microsecond in application-latency examples; NIC-to-NIC and RoCEv2 results are topology, NIC, software and workload specific
131,072GPUs in a two-tier fabric of 512×100G switches with each 800G NIC split into eight 100G planes (MRC consortium design; 4-plane production configs documented)
Oct 14, 2025Broadcom Thor Ultra: industry-first 800G UEC-compliant AI-Ethernet NIC (packet-level multipathing, OOO placement, selective retransmit) — sampling at announcement