Ethernet is winning the war against InfiniBand in AI back-end networks, potentially driving nearly $80 B in data center switch sales over the next five years, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.
“When we first initiated our coverage of AI Back-end Networks in late 2023, the market was dominated by InfiniBand, holding over 80 percent share,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “Despite its dominance, we have consistently predicted that Ethernet would ultimately prevail at scale. What is notable, however, is the rapid pace at which Ethernet gained ground in AI back-end networks. As the industry moves to 800 Gbps and beyond, we believe Ethernet is now firmly positioned to overtake InfiniBand in these high-performance deployments.
“Although Ethernet is gaining ground in AI back-end networks, a key question remains: how much of the Ethernet opportunity will be captured by NVIDIA versus other switch vendors? In 2024, Celestica, NVIDIA, and Huawei led the Ethernet segment of the AI Back-end Switch market. However, we anticipate significant share shifts in 2025 as large-scale Ethernet deployments at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and other GPU-as-a-Service Providers ramp up—creating opportunities for additional switch vendors such as Accton, Arista, Cisco, Juniper/HPE, Nokia, and others to gain traction,” continued Boujelbene.
Additional highlights from the July 2025 AI Networks for AI Workloads Advanced Research Report:
- Growth from GPU-as-a-Service Providers such as CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Vultr, and others is projected to outpace that of Tier 1 Cloud Service Providers in the next five years.
- The majority of the switch ports deployed in AI back-end networks are expected to be 800 Gbps by 2025, 1600 Gbps by 2027, and 3200 Gbps by 2030.
- Co-packaged optic adoption in AI clusters will start to materialize in the next few years, led by NVIDIA.
