🔗Nvidia Networking Hits $17.5B in Q2, Outpacing Cisco's $17.3B

Nvidia's networking business now out-earns Cisco, and that matters for your cluster

Nvidia's networking business just passed Cisco. Networking revenue hit $17.5 billion in Q2, while Cisco brought in $17.3 billion over the same period. Yes, a GPU company is now out-earning the company that basically built the internet's plumbing. Why should you care? Because buying compute and networking from one vendor is a real workflow change. Nvidia's pitch is that its GPUs, ConnectX NICs, Quantum InfiniBand switches, and Spectrum-X Ethernet get tuned together, so troubleshooting stops being a finger-pointing exercise. Recursion, the drug discovery AI company, said exactly that about its own clusters. If your team is standing up training infrastructure, expect procurement to push the bundle hard. The numbers behind it: Nvidia paid $6.9 billion for Mellanox in 2019. Networking revenue has grown steadily since then, then jumped sharply in calendar 2023 after ChatGPT kicked off the AI buildout. With GB200 NVL72, NVSwitch moved out of single systems into dedicated appliances, and Nvidia sells nine NVSwitch trays for every rack. NVSwitch alone now makes up roughly a third of networking revenue. Watch whether Spectrum-X keeps closing the gap with InfiniBand on performance while staying open on interoperability. That's the real test of whether the integrated stack wins or just locks people in.