Huawei used its Hot Chips 2025 slot to introduce its UB-Mesh technology that is designed to unify all interconnections across AI data centers — both inside nodes and outside nodes — with a single protocol. The company also said that it will announce it is opening up the protocol for all users for free at its event next month. The technology is meant to replace PCIe, CXL, NVLink, and TCP/IP protocols with one single protocol to cut latency, control costs, and improve reliability in gigawatt-class datacenters. To push the initiative, Huawei plans to open-source the specification. But will it gain traction?
"Next month we have a conference, where we are going to announce that the UB-Mesh protocol will be published and disclosed to anybody like a free license," said Heng Liao, chief scientist of HiSilicon, Huawei's processor arm. "This is a very new technology; we are seeing competing standardization efforts from different camps. […] Depending on how successful we are in deploying actual systems and demand from partners and customers, we can talk about turning it into some kind of standard."
