India, Oct. 13 -- Nvidia and Cisco have announced plans to develop a high-density optical transceiver form factor designed to increase network capacity and power efficiency in AI data centres, as growing workloads place greater demands on the infrastructure connecting processors, servers and storage systems.

The proposed Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP) is designed to support electrical signalling at 400Gb/s per lane and provide aggregate capacity of up to 12.8Tb/s. The companies say it could enable AI infrastructure operators to connect more computing systems within the same network footprint, potentially reducing the need to add network tiers as facilities expand.

Announced at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit...