NVIDIA and Cisco announced on October 12, 2026, at the Open Compute Project Global Summit plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable, or USFP, a new optical-transceiver format designed for 400 Gb/s electrical signaling per lane and up to 12.8 Tb/s of overall capacity. The proposal targets AI-factory Ethernet networks that need more bandwidth without adding switch tiers.

What happened

According to the NVIDIA announcement and Cisco’s release, the first planned USFP transceivers would place 16 full-duplex lanes in an OSFP-sized footprint for switches and SuperNICs, with a path to 32 or more lanes.

NVIDIA and @Cisco introduce pluggable optics to scale AI factories.

USFP is the first module to support 400Gb/s per lane, delivering 4x the bandwidth density of today's optics. AI builders can connect more compute to the same switch — no extra network tiers, less power per bit… pic.twitter.com/URHuCDtLHm

— NVIDIA Newsroom (@nvidianewsroom) October 12, 2026

What the evidence shows

The companies say USFP can provide four times the front-panel bandwidth density and about 1.3 times the power efficiency of 200 Gb/s-per-lane pluggable optics. The design supports up to 100 watts of module power dissipation. TE Connectivity and Amphenol are working on cages, connectors and modules. These are vendor-stated design targets, not independent benchmark results.

The announcement follows related moves toward higher-density Ethernet, including Cisco’s 51.2 Tb/s G302 switch silicon, Keysight’s 1.6T Ethernet link-recovery testing, and reports that AI-optics supply is already heavily committed.

What remains unclear

NVIDIA and Cisco did not announce pricing or a shipment date for USFP modules. They said they plan to create an open industry specification through a community-led multi-source project. Until that specification, qualification work and production hardware arrive, USFP remains a proposed ecosystem roadmap rather than a deployed standard.

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