DriveNets Intros New High-Speed AI Switches

In a move into the heart of an AI trend, DriveNets this week announced two new switches that support 102.4 Tb/s, liquid cooling, and a range of capabilities for AI networking.

DriveNets, which recently scored $410 million in fresh funding at a reported $8.5 billion valuation, has expanded its traditional business of serving up telco-grade networking on white-box switches into AI networking with a new line of AI Fabric platforms.

The latest of these platforms are the DriveNets 2600SL (liquid-cooled) and 2601S (air-cooled), both geared for large-scale, scale-out AI infrastructures with hundreds of thousands of XPUs, including those from NVIDIA and AMD. Both switches are based on Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 ASIC, which affords up to 64 ports of 1.6-Tb/s, or 102.4 Tb/s total bandwidth. The switches are set to ship this quarter.

“The new additions to our AI portfolio deliver industry-leading performance at massive cluster scale and let our customers maximize infrastructure utilization and power efficiency on any AI accelerator,” said Ido Susan, co-founder and CEO of DriveNets, in a press release. “These capabilities will only become more critical as the industry moves to Heterogeneous AI architectures.”

The Race to 1.6-Tb/s and More

Those heterogeneous AI architectures are on the move. DriveNets’s announcement brings it squarely into competition with Arista Networks, whose 7060XE7 Series of “AI supersystem” switches is set to start shipping in Q4 2026. That series also is based on the Tomahawk 6, featuring similar speeds. Arista boasts an open-networking platform based on Ethernet. The vendor also will ship a liquid-cooled design in Q1 2027. Arista's switches support optical networking in part via linear pluggale optics (LPO).

DriveNets is also heading up against Cisco, whose G300 chip and associated products, including the N9000, are set to ship shortly. Cisco says it will work with multivendor CPUs and XPUs in an open configuration. Cisco's switches also support optical networking.

NVIDIA too has a competitive offering with its Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics switches, also set to ship in the second half of 2026. Even NVIDIA is pushing a multivendor message, stating that the switches work with GPUs and CPUs from AMD and other third parties.

Notably, DriveNets has been have been supporting ZR and ZR+ pluggable transceivers from a wide range of vendors for years, though it hasn't yet made any further optical switching announcements.

Fabric Performance a Differentiator

DriveNets claims its differentiator is its capability to offer a network fabric for AI from scale up to scale out and scale across (within the rack, between clusters, and between datacenters) with superior control and performance. Its Endpoint Scheduled Ethernet (ESE), for instance, can be paired with smart NICs from NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom to prevent congestion before it enters the network by handling scheduling and traffic management at the NIC endpoint. DriveNets also features kernel and Collective Communications Library (CLL) optimizations to improve performance.

To manage the switches, DriveNets offers its AI Cluster Orchestrator (ACO), a cloud-based system that monitors and provisions both the network and the GPUs attached to it. An additional DriveNets Infrastructure Service provides installation, configuration, and optimization as a managed service.

DriveNets also claims a variety of configurations and a radix that spans a range of ports and speed levels from 512 x 200 Gb/s and up, which should appeal to developers of agentic AI.

Futuriom Take: DriveNets’s new switches feature a range of performance optimization capabilities across an AI networking fabric that is fully manageable. Its support of Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 ASIC ensures full Ethernet compatibility across a range of configurations. Timely delivery could ensure it a solid position in a highly competitive market.