By Timothy Green, The Motley Fool
Publication Date: 2026-01-15 23:50:00
Nvidia has built an enormous networking business in just a few years.
Nvidia (NVDA +2.06%) dominates the market for data center GPUs, and it’s now following the well-tread playbook of expanding into adjacent areas. The company has been investing in networking for years, and with its push into rack-scale AI solutions, the networking business is exploding.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2026, Nvidia generated $8.2 billion in networking revenue, up 162% year over year. This category includes NVLink, which connects GPUs together, InfiniBand switches, and the Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform. Nvidia noted that Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and xAI are currently building massive AI data centers that will use its Spectrum-X Ethernet switches.
Image source: Nvidia.
Why AI networking is so critical
At CES 2026, Nvidia CFO Colette Kress disclosed that the networking attach rate, or the percentage of customers who buy full AI systems and also purchase networking products, is now close to 90%. Kress also noted that even customers who use their own customer AI chips for a portion of a deployment are still often using Nvidia’s networking technology.
The networking needs of an AI data center are very different than the networking needs of a standard cloud data center. For AI training workloads, the data throughput between GPUs must be sufficiently high to prevent the GPUs from idling. The quick movement of data is also crucial for AI inference workloads.
Nvidia has grown to become a…
