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
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
~1.8 TB/s vs ~400 Gb/sscale-up (NVLink5/GPU) vs scale-out (per-NIC) bandwidth — roughly 18x apart per direction (900 vs 50 GB/s each way)