Scaling AI Infrastructure with Next-Gen Interconnects

By Kalar Rajendiran

April 29, 2025

At the recent IPSoC Conference in Silicon Valley, Aparna Tarde gave a talk on the importance of Next-Gen Interconnects to scale AI infrastructure. Aparna is a Sr. Technical Product Manager at Synopsys. A synthesis of the salient points from her talk follows.

Key Takeaways

• The rapid advancement of AI is reshaping data center infrastructure requirements, demanding immense compute resources and unprecedented memory capacity.
• Efficient XPU-to-XPU communication is crucial, requiring high-bandwidth, low-latency, and energy-efficient interconnects for large-scale compute clusters.
• New communication protocols and interfaces like UALink and Ultra Ethernet are essential for scaling AI performance and accommodating distributed AI models.
• The shift from copper to optical links and the adoption of Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) are key to addressing bandwidth challenges in AI infrastructure.
• Multi-die packaging technologies are becoming mainstream to meet AI workloads' demands for low latency, high bandwidth, and efficient interconnects.