Source: Hot Chips The accelerated life cycles that AI is driving woke up a normally sleepy August. Held virtually, Hot Interconnects (HotI 2025) spanned three days with a mix of invited talks, sponsor talks, and tutorials. Some of the brief sponsor talks merely previewed larger disclosures at Hot Chips, which was held at Stanford University the following week. This year, Hot Chips’ agenda included an Optical session that featured three startups plus Nvidia. It also included Networking and Machine Learning (ML) sessions with talks from leading vendors. Although Nvidia was the marquee name in Hot Chips' Optical session, Gilad Shainer's talk on co-packaged silicon photonics lacked any new technical details on the company's CPO switches. Instead, the company used the event to announce Spectrum-XGS, which extends its Spectrum-X Ethernet solution across data centers. Nvidia calls this "scale-across" networking because it primarily targets data center clusters, but it is...