The latest episode of The Byrne-Wheeler Report covers a slew of deals from funding to outright acquisitions. In my coverage space, Upscale AI has raised another $200 million at a unicorn valuation. Marvell is acquiring CXL-switch startup Xconn Technologies. Joe and I discuss two announcements in the RISC-V arena. In case you're wondering about Episode 7, it was a special episode with guest Mike Demler discussing Nvidia's Christmas Eve $20 billion bombshell Groq deal.

We recorded Episode 6 of The Byrne-Wheeler Report on December 19, 2025, i.e., before Nvidia's Christmas Eve bombshell (Groq). More on the latter to follow soon. Meanwhile, Joe and I caught up the latest on Google TPU customers, Tsavorite coming out of stealth, Marvell's Industry Analyst Day disclosures, and Qualcomm acquiring Ventana.

October was a busy month, between the OCP Global Summit and being the lead author on the LightCounting switch report. The new report adds another level of granularity to the scale-up switch forecast, which incorporates NVLink, UALink, Scale-Up Ethernet (SUE), and non-Nvidia proprietary interconnects. There are many other changes to the report, including revisions to the methodology for the co-packaged optics (CPO) forecast. The newsletter summary is freely available: Co-packaged Optics Grow the Scale-out Switch Pie Source: Wheeler's Network

With the formal launch of the MI300 GPU, AMD revealed new plans for scaling the multi-GPU interconnects vital to AI-training performance. The company's approach relies on a partner ecosystem, which stands in stark contrast with NVIDIA's end-to-end solutions. The plans revolve around AMD's proprietary Infinity Fabric and its underlying XGMI interconnect. Infinity Fabric Adopts Switching As with its prior generation, AMD uses XGMI to connect multiple MI300 GPUs in what it calls a hive. The hive shares a homogeneous memory space formed by the HBM attached to each GPU. In current designs, the GPUs connect directly using XGMI in a mesh or ring topology. Each MI300X GPU has up to seven Infinity Fabric links, each with 16 lanes. The 4th-gen Infinity Fabric supports up to 32Gbps per lane, yielding 128GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth per link. At the MI300 launch, Broadcom announced that its next-generation PCI Express (PCIe) switch chip will add support for XGMI. At last October...