Part of $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ 's moat & value-add is its contro...
And $Broadcom (AVGO.US)$ remains the only alternative chip vendor to it, while $Arista Networks (ANET.US)$ served as the end OEM.
$Meta Platforms (META.US)$ 's latest two H100 DCs use two different networking infra, one from $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ 's full stack including Mellanox switch while another uses $Arista Networks (ANET.US)$ switch powered by $Broadcom (AVGO.US)$ chip, and $Cisco (CSCO.US)$ switch with its own Silicon One chip
Interesting that Meta said the two have the same performance. This is surprising given $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ always prefer and fine tune the system for its full stack DC.
The incoming Blackwell GPU is going to be another challenge for $Broadcom (AVGO.US)$ as it needs to be brought in 880G Ethernet RoCE in mass deployment too. And $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ 's latest chip seems to be prioritizing NVlink + Infiniband NVDA's proprietary interconnect bandwidth vs. PCI-E.
So potentially by limiting the speed of PCI-E + RoCE on the chip I/O interface level, Nvidia can make it less appealing for players to go for an open DC architecture. This remains a threat to Broadcom.
Obviously Meta will continue to push the open architecture but so far it seems to be the minority.
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Huang he : The key to the internet is connectivity, and Ethernet is the only proven technology to work. Its wide application and open architecture are irreplaceable. Yellow doesn't work either.