Nvidia's networking boom
Nvidia’s networking revenue jumped 263% year‑over‑year, underlining that the AI hardware story now spans GPUs, SmartNICs, DPUs and high‑bandwidth switching — hardware that trading infra teams are watching closely. That surge points to tighter supply dynamics for RDMA‑capable and programmable networking gear that matters to sub‑ms trading stacks. (fool.com) (blogs.nvidia.com)
NVIDIA reported roughly $10.98 billion in networking sales in the quarter that ended Jan. 25, 2026, a figure the company said came from its NVLink, Spectrum‑X and related networking products. (cnbc.com) The company said its full‑year networking business exceeded $31 billion for fiscal 2026, a run‑rate NVIDIA described as more than a tenfold increase versus fiscal 2021. (crn.com) NVIDIA is pairing Spectrum‑X Ethernet switches with BlueField‑3 SuperNICs/DPUs and NVLink rack‑scale interconnects as the core stack behind the revenue growth, with Spectrum‑X marketing claiming a 1.6× performance uplift for large AI GPU fabrics and explicit support for advanced RoCE extensions. (nvidia.com)(firstpasslab.com) Hyperscalers are already being enabled with NVLink rack integrations—NVIDIA referenced NVLink enablement with cloud partners on the earnings call and in its investor materials as part of the networking expansion. (fool.com) RDMA‑centric SmartNICs and DPUs historically used in trading stacks—Mellanox/NVIDIA ConnectX and BlueField families—are documented in vendor whitepapers as delivering single‑ to low‑microsecond messaging and sub‑5µs average latencies in trading benchmarks, which explains why financial firms prize RDMA/SmartNIC capacity. (network.nvidia.com)(mellanoxnetwork.com) NVIDIA’s surge has intensified demand pressure across Ethernet switch and RDMA‑capable NIC supply chains at the same time vendors such as AMD/Pensando, Intel, Marvell and cloud providers (AWS Nitro etc.) remain active competitors in the DPU/SmartNIC market. (sdxcentral.com)(cloudswit.ch) NVIDIA guided continued sequential growth in its next fiscal quarter on the call and noted hyperscalers still accounted for just over half of data‑center revenue, signaling ongoing hyperscaler orders that will affect availability windows for RDMA‑capable programmable networking gear used in sub‑ms trading stacks. (nvidianews.nvidia.com)(cnbc.com)
