Broadcom Chip to Help Power AI by Linking Up Smaller Data Centers

(Bloomberg) — The age of ever-bigger AI data centers is leaving cloud companies with a question: What do with older, smaller facilities?

Broadcom Inc. is offering a possible answer, at least for operations located with some proximity. A new version of its Jericho networking chip announced Monday can transfer larger volumes of data at higher speeds. That means customers can link up several smaller data centers to create one big system for developing or running AI models, said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager of the company’s core switching group.

The Jericho4 product is capable of connecting more than 1 million processors across multiple data centers and can handle about four times more information than the previous version, Broadcom said.

Broadcom has been benefiting from demand for gear that can be used to build out AI systems. Its networking components, such as routers and switches, direct traffic between graphics processing units, or GPUs, the pricey chips used to create AI models. 

While some of the Broadcom gear is used to move data within parts of the same rack or data center building, there is also a need for components that work across buildings or even greater distances. Moreover, the power consumption of giant GPU clusters is getting too large to keep them all in the same location, Velaga said.

“When they try to do a cluster of 200,000 GPUs or even 100,000 GPUs, you soon hit 300 megawatts, and 300 megawatts is not available inside one physical building today,” Velaga said. The Jericho family of networking chips will help that work, he said.

Companies also are trying to move data center capacity nearer to customers, helping speed up the answers users get from AI models. That means cloud and AI businesses will need to make use of data centers located in congested metropolitan areas, where it may be more practical to connect several smaller setups, Velaga said.

Broadcom’s Tomahawk line can connect racks inside a data center, but those distances are usually under a kilometer (0.6 miles), Velaga said. The Jericho equipment can handle distances of more than 100 kilometers. 

The Jericho4 will start shipping Monday to early customers such as cloud providers and network gear makers, which will build it into their products, Velaga said. It will take about nine months for it to be fully deployed, he said.

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