The Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium has officially incorporated, which means it's now a legal entity. The Consortium seeks to create a new standard for high-speed, low-latency communication across servers in AI data centers, and has board members from AMD, Intel, Meta, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Astera Labs, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. The Consortium is also looking for new contributor members.
UALink seeks to become the industry's open standard for scale-up connections of many AI accelerators, and to become a competitor with Nvidia's proprietary NVLink. NVLink, Nvidia's solution for GPU-to-GPU communication in servers or pods of servers, uses Infiniband — another effectively Nvidia-owned communication technology — for higher-level scaling. Infiniband is being challenged by newcomer Ultra Ethernet, which is another major consortium of tech giants creating an open standard to counter Nvidia's dominance.
