The brief

Analyst view

• Tomahawk 6 delivers 102.4 Tbps switching capacity, double competing Ethernet switches.
• The CPO variant (TH6-Davisson) began shipping October 2025, integrating optical with switch silicon for 50% power savings.
• OpenAI partnership to co-develop 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators for deployment from 2026, full rollout by end 2029.

Technical approach

As reported

Switch Fabric

256 high-speed SerDes lanes

Tomahawk 6 has 256 lanes at 400 Gbps (copper) or 200 Gbps (CPO), for 102.4 Tbps total. Each SerDes converts parallel data to high-speed serial.

Co-Packaged Optics

Integrated optical transceiver

TH6-Davisson integrates optical engines on the switch die using TSMC's COUPE platform. This cuts power ~50% and latency by eliminating separate optical modules.

AI Acceleration

Hardware collective communication support

The switch includes hardened AllReduce and AllGather primitives, reducing CPU overhead for AI cluster communication patterns.