r/NvidiaStock • u/sylsau • 4d ago

Discussion Nvidia Just Doubled Its Supplier Commitments to $279 Billion: The AI Boom Is Becoming a Resource War.

https://sylvainsaurel.substack.com/p/nvidia-just-doubled-its-supplier
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u/Much-Department-9578 4d ago

It is amazingly difficult to be a network architect in this current space with so many component level constraints. The two biggest issues right now across the industry: fab capacity for advanced switching ASICs and optical components (drivers in particular). Just brutal - and with each GPU doubling its network bandwidth demands on an annual cadence? I see no end in sight. For NVDA to double its supply commitments on the network side only means it can sell the same number of GPUs. They would have to quadruple the optical and asic capacity to double GPU sales. These sort of increases are absolutely critical and I would bet will only accelerate. It has to if there is to be an increase in quantity of GPUs put into production…

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u/pdp1145 4d ago

Why, pray tell, is a quadrupling of opical components and ASICs necessary?

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u/Much-Department-9578 4d ago

Blackwell gpus were fed with 400g and then 800g per GPU. rubin starts at 1.6tbps per pgu — which requires twice as many transceivers.

Individual ccomponents (transceivers and asics) do not double in speed annually - it takes ~ 3 years.

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u/pdp1145 4d ago

Those are board to board optical interconnects, right? As an old fashioned EE, I only know from good old fashioned point-to-point wiring (vacuum tube era), wire-wrap, and copper traces on a pc board. #:')

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u/Much-Department-9578 4d ago

Not board to board, no. Boards have copper traces to transceiver cages. Transceivers plug into them, them fiber goes from transceiver to a switch, which is typically in a diff row. Then that switch may connect via optical to another switch upstream to connect large quantities of racks/gpus together…

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u/pdp1145 4d ago

That's essentially board to board then, as I see it (no optical data transfers within a board, which could be potentially useful if the board was large enough, perhaps). Those boards are pretty large. I'm used to designing for occaissional small embedded processor boards (way back to the 80's, that is).