CONFIRMED: NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans for USFP on 12 October 2026. These are plans: no ship date or pricing was given. Bandwidth and efficiency comparisons are the companies’ own claims.
NVIDIA and Cisco have announced plans for the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), “a new high-density 400Gb/s-per-lane optical module” for AI data centres [1]. Pluggable optics are the small transceivers that slot into the front of network switches and network cards and turn electrical signals into light for fibre cables.
What the companies say USFP will do
- USFP “is designed to be the first module to support 400Gb/s-per-lane electrical signals, enabling capacity up to 12.8Tb/s”, the companies say [1]. That is double the 200Gb/s per lane used today, according to the release.
- The first planned USFP transceivers “will pack 16 full-duplex lanes in an octal small form factor (OSFP)-sized footprint supporting both switches and SuperNICs, with the ability to expand to 32 and more lanes in the future” [1]. OSFP is an existing module size, so USFP is designed to take up about the same space.
- The companies claim USFP “delivers 4x the bandwidth density and 1.3x the power efficiency of 200Gb/s-per-lane optics” [1]. The body of the release puts the efficiency gain at “approximately 1.3x” [1].
- USFP “supports power dissipation of up to 100 watts without needing a separate, dedicated embedded cooling circuit within the transceiver” [1].
The companies say this lets operators “connect more computing systems without adding network tiers” [1]: fewer extra layers of switches as a network grows.
Partners and next steps
NVIDIA and Cisco said they are working with TE Connectivity and Amphenol “to build USFP cages, connectors and modules, with additional partners expected to join” [1]. They “plan to create an open industry specification for USFP through an upcoming community-led multi-source project” [1].
“Building the world’s largest AI factories starts with rethinking the smallest of connections,” said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president, NVIDIA [1].
“Cisco and NVIDIA recognized that scaling pluggable optics to 400Gb/s per lane would require more than another incremental extension of today’s module designs,” said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of optical systems and optics at Cisco [1].
Neither company gave a date for when USFP products will ship or what they will cost.
NVIDIA’s other announcements at the OCP Global Summit are covered separately: NVIDIA opens Vera Rubin rack designs to OCP; Meta adopts Spectrum-6.
Sources
- NVIDIA and Cisco, “NVIDIA and Cisco Introduce New Pluggable Optics Form Factor to Scale AI Factories”, NVIDIA Newsroom, 12 October 2026. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-and-cisco-introduce-new-pluggable-optics-form-factor-to-scale-ai-factories
