Broadcom’s latest Ethernet switch tackles AI demands on networks

Broadcom’s latest Ethernet switch, the Tomahawk 6 series, delivers record-breaking bandwidth just as AI systems push networks to their limits.

If you’ve been following the AI boom closely, you’ll know that one of the biggest bottlenecks isn’t necessarily computational power—it’s moving all that data around. Broadcom’s announcement that it’s now shipping its Tomahawk 6 switch series aims to provide some welcome relief.

This beast of a chip delivers 102.4 Terabits per second of switching capacity. To put that in perspective, it’s double the bandwidth of anything else currently available on the market. And it couldn’t come at a better time.

As AI models grow increasingly massive, the networks connecting thousands of specialised processors are straining to keep up. Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 claims to be purpose-built to solve this precise problem.

Ram Velaga, SVP and GM of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom, said: “Tomahawk 6 is not just an upgrade – it’s a breakthrough. It marks a turning point in AI infrastructure design, combining the highest bandwidth, power efficiency, and adaptive routing features for scale-up and scale-out networks into one platform.”

According to Velaga, “demand from customers and partners has been unprecedented.” You could put that comment down to the usual executive hype, but in an industry where networking hardware rarely makes headlines, it could be telling of the genuine need for more capacity.

Bloomberg Intelligence’s semiconductor analyst Kunjan Sobhani offers some valuable context here: “AI clusters are scaling from tens to thousands of accelerators, turning the network into a critical bottleneck while expected to deliver unprecedented bandwidth and latency.”

The most interesting aspect, in my view, is how this chip challenges proprietary networking approaches. 

“By breaking the 100Tbps barrier and unifying scale-up and scale-out Ethernet, Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 gives hyperscalers an open, standards-based fabric – free of proprietary lock-in – and a clear, flexible path to the next wave of AI infrastructure,” Sobhani noted.

Broadcom delivers more than just raw speed with its latest Ethernet switch

What makes the Tomahawk 6 particularly clever isn’t just its headline-grabbing 100+ Tbps figure. Looking under the hood, there’s some innovative engineering at work.

For one, Broadcom has included a variant with 1,024 100G SerDes on a single chip. If you’re wondering what that means in practical terms, it allows for much longer copper connections without needing to convert to optical—saving money and power while reducing complexity.

Speaking of optical connections, Broadcom hasn’t forgotten about the inevitable march toward light-based networking. The company will offer Tomahawk 6 with co-packaged optics (CPO)—essentially building the optical components right into the switch package rather than connecting them externally. This approach slashes power consumption and cuts latency, two critical factors when you’re building systems with thousands of interconnected processors.

Networks to scale AI to new heights

What caught my attention is how Broadcom’s latest Ethernet switch appears to be truly built for the next generation of AI systems that we’re only beginning to glimpse.

The Tomahawk 6 includes something called “Cognitive Routing 2.0″—a fancy name for a suite of networking features that can dynamically route traffic based on real-time conditions. This isn’t just marketing fluff; when you’re running workloads like mixture-of-experts models (where different AI “specialists” handle different parts of a task) or complex reinforcement learning systems, how data flows between processors becomes critically important.

According to cloud infrastructure engineers, scaling AI systems beyond the current limits will require completely rethinking networking architectures. The ability to support both “scale-out” (connecting many systems together) and “scale-up” (building bigger individual systems) with a single networking technology could be transformative.

Broadcom claims several organisations are already planning deployments with more than 100,000 XPUs (accelerated processors) using Tomahawk 6 for both scale-out and scale-up connections. That’s a huge vote of confidence in this approach.

Opening the ecosystem

Perhaps the most forward-thinking aspect of Broadcom’s strategy is their push for open standards. Rather than creating yet another proprietary solution, they’ve developed the Scale Up Ethernet (SUE) Framework, which they introduced at the Open Compute Project meeting earlier this year.

This open approach is refreshing in an industry where lock-in strategies are common. By sharing these specifications freely, Broadcom is betting that widespread adoption will be more valuable than exclusive control—a bet that typically pays off in the networking world.

The Tomahawk 6 works within Broadcom’s broader ecosystem of networking products, including their Jericho switches, Thor NICs, and various optical components. Together, they form what the company calls an “end-to-end Ethernet AI platform.”

As AI systems grow ever larger – with some researchers already discussing million-processor systems – the underlying infrastructure needs to evolve. Broadcom’s new switch, with its ability to support up to 512 XPUs in a scale-up cluster and over 100,000 XPUs in a two-tier network, seems timed to meet this emerging need.

While we’ve seen plenty of hype around AI chips themselves, the often-overlooked networking layer might determine how far and how fast AI capabilities can advance. If Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 Ethernet switch delivers on its promises, it could become one of the most important enabling technologies for the next generation of AI.

See also: Jinxin Technology projects $70 million revenue, citing AI-powered content

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Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, broadband, broadcom, connectivity, ethernet, networks, switches, telecoms