NVIDIA Pivots as Networking Stalls

Yes, $11B in Blackwell revenue is impressive. Yes, Nvidia's data-center revenue grew 93% year over year. Under the surface, however, there's trouble in networking. In the January quarter (Q4 FY25), networking revenue declined 9% year over year and 3% sequentially. In its earnings call, CFO Collette Kress said that Nvidia's networking attach rate was "robust" at more than 75%. Her very next sentence, however, hinted at what's happening underneath that supposed robustness. "We are transitioning from small NVLink8 with InfiniBand to large NVLink72 with Spectrum-X," said Kress. About one year ago, Nvidia positioned InfiniBand for "AI factories" and Spectrum-X for multi-tenant clouds. That positioning collapsed when the company revealed xAI selected Spectrum-X for what is clearly an AI factory. InfiniBand appears to be retreating to its legacy HPC market while Ethernet comes to the fore. Nvidia Data-Center Revenue So how do we square 93% DC grow...