Broadcom Introduces Industry’s First 800G AI Ethernet NIC

Thor Ultra is Fully Compliant with Ultra Ethernet Consortium; Delivers Cutting-Edge Performance, Scalability, and Reliability for AI Scale-Out Networking

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 14, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO), a global leader in semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, today announced Thor Ultra, the industry’s first 800G AI Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC), capable of interconnecting hundreds of thousands of XPUs to drive trillion-parameter AI workloads. By adopting the open Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specification, Thor Ultra gives customers the ability to scale AI workloads with unparalleled performance, and efficiency in an open ecosystem.

“Thor Ultra delivers on the vision of Ultra Ethernet Consortium for modernizing RDMA for large AI clusters,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom. “Designed from the ground up, Thor Ultra is the industry’s first 800G Ethernet NIC and is fully feature compliant with UEC specification. We are grateful to our customers for their partnership and to our exceptional engineering team for the product innovation.”

Traditional RDMA lacks multipathing, out-of-order packet delivery, selective retransmit and scalable congestion control. Thor Ultra introduces a groundbreaking suite of UEC-compliant, advanced RDMA innovations including:

• Packet-Level multipathing for efficient load balancing.
• Out-of-Order packet delivery directly to XPU memory for maximizing fabric utilization.
• Selective retransmission for efficient data transfer.
• Programmable Receiver-based and Sender-based congestion control algorithms.

Thor Ultra delivers high performance advanced RDMA capabilities in an open ecosystem. This gives customers the freedom to connect with any XPU’s, optics, or switches and to reduce dependency on proprietary, vertically integrated solutions.

Additional Broadcom Thor Ultra highlights include:

• Available in standard PCIe CEM and OCP 3.0 form factors.
• 200G or 100G PAM4 SerDes with support for long-reach passive copper.
• Industry’s lowest Bit Error Rate (BER) SerDes, reducing link flaps and accelerating Job Completion Time (JCT).
• PCI Express Gen6 x16 host interface.
• Line-rate encryption and decryption with PSP offload, relieving the host/XPU of compute-intensive tasks.
• Secure boot with signed firmware and device attestation.
• Programmable congestion control pipeline.
• Packet trimming and Congestion Signaling (CSIG) support with Tomahawk 5, Tomahawk 6 or any UEC compliant switch.

A state-of-the-art NIC, Thor Ultra is a key addition to Broadcom’s Ethernet AI networking portfolio. Together with Tomahawk 6, Tomahawk 6-Davisson, Tomahawk Ultra, Jericho 4 and Scale-Up Ethernet (SUE), Thor Ultra enables an open ecosystem for large scale high-performance XPU deployments.