UALink Consortium poised to compete with Nvidia's NVLink — AMD and Intel-led group opens doors to contributor members

The Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium has officially incorporated, which means it's now a legal entity. The Consortium seeks to create a new standard for high-speed, low-latency communication across servers in AI data centers, and has board members from AMD, Intel, Meta, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Astera Labs, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. The Consortium is also looking for new contributor members.

UALink seeks to become the industry's open standard for scale-up connections of many AI accelerators, and to become a competitor with Nvidia's proprietary NVLink. NVLink, Nvidia's solution for GPU-to-GPU communication in servers or pods of servers, uses Infiniband — another effectively Nvidia-owned communication technology — for higher-level scaling. Infiniband is being challenged by newcomer Ultra Ethernet, which is another major consortium of tech giants creating an open standard to counter Nvidia's dominance.

Willie Nelson, president of the UALink Consortium, is also opening the doors for new companies and groups to join the party. "Interested companies are encouraged to join as Contributor members to support our mission: establishing an open and high-performance accelerator interconnect for AI workloads."

UALink's 1.0 spec is coming to members this year. The standard will enable up to 200Gbps per lane connection for up to 1,024 accelerators within an AI pod. Assuming Nvidia HGX-style servers with 8 AI accelerators inside, UALink could connect up to 128 of these machines in a pod. It is most likely that UALink will be often used at a smaller scale, however, with pods of around eight servers communicating with each other via UALink and further upscaling being handled by Ultra Ethernet. Consortium members will gain access to the spec this year, with a general review opening up in Q1 2025.

The UALink standard's release in Q1 2025 will line up with the release of version 1 of Ultra Ethernet, and AMD recently announced the industry's first Ultra Ethernet-ready 400GbE card. UALink and Ultra Ethernet are both made up of industry giants seeking to dethrone Nvidia and are almost assured to succeed as open standards in the AI data center space thanks to their wide levels of support. "The work being done by the companies in UALink to create an open, high performance and scalable accelerator fabric is critical for the future of AI," said Forrest Norrod, executive VP and general manager of the Data Center Solutions Group at AMD.

Samsung is likely to be among the first Contributor members of the Consortium, as it announced its intentions to join back in June. The Ultra Ethernet Consortium will also likely see a lot of crossover, and industry giants such as Baidu, Dell, Huawei, IBM, Nokia, Lenovo, Supermicro, and Tencent joined as contributors to UE in the last few months. Nvidia is expected to remain outside of the Consortium, as its NVLink and Infiniband technologies are proprietary and have seen widespread use already thanks to the company's dominance of the AI data center market.