Current data centre switch market spending is on front-end networks used primarily to connect general-purpose servers but AI workloads will require a new back-end infrastructure buildout, Dell’Oro Group says.

While InfiniBand is currently dominating the AI back-end network market, Ethernet is poised to take over soon, the firm adds.

“As predicted, growth in AI workloads and the associated data centre infrastructure continues to track well ahead of market expectations. We therefore raised our forecast for the AI back-end networks compared to our prior December 2023 forecast, though the latter was initially considered very aggressive by a number of industry players,” says Dell’Oro Group vice president Sameh Boujelbene.

“The upward adjustment was broad-based across Ethernet and InfiniBand. We are now, however, much more optimistic about the ability of Ethernet to eclipse InfiniBand within the next few years. This optimism stems from significant improvements on the technology side as well as market demand.”

“On the technology side, we are observing significant enhancements on Ethernet at multiple layers of the stack: network chips, network operating systems, network interface cards, and optics. In terms of demand, we are tracking significant new Ethernet wins, such as the latest 100K GPU cluster win announced by Nvidia, among many other potential wins by other switch vendors including Celestica, Cisco, Arista, Juniper, and Nokia.”

The AI Networks for AI Workloads Report highlighted the following:

- AI networks will accelerate the transition to higher speeds. The majority of the switch ports deployed in AI back-end networks are expected to be 800Gbps by 2025 and 1600Gbps by 2027.

- While most of the market demand will come from Tier 1 Cloud Service Providers, we have significantly raised our forecast for Tier 2/3 and large enterprises in light of their accelerated pace of AI workload adoption and infrastructure deployment.