NVIDIA is reportedly buying large amounts of long-haul dark fiber across the United States, a project Wolfe Research said it verified in a July 20 note after investor inquiries. The firm cited an earlier disclosure from Needham, which said NVIDIA was pursuing a large telecom network buildout that could involve $5 billion to $10 billion in spending over the next three years. According to the report, the buildout could include as many as 100 fiber pairs, or 200 individual fibers. Based on a conservative estimate using dense wavelength division multiplexing, or DWDM, Wccftech said the network’s theoretical capacity could reach 7.68 Pbps, far above the scale of a single major subsea cable system. The publication outlined three possible reasons for the move: linking distributed data centers into a massive GPU compute cluster, giving NeoCloud customers better network infrastructure, and allowing NVIDIA to push deeper into the GPU-as-a-Service market without relying as heavily on hyperscalers. Wolfe Research named Ciena, Corning and Cisco as stocks that could benefit. It called Ciena its favorite play, while Corning and Cisco were highlighted for their positions in fiber and networking infrastructure.

According to Odaily, people familiar with the matter said NVIDIA has decided, for now, not to adopt Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s COUPE technology route. The company’s earlier “Plan A” was built on TSMC’s co-packaged optics platform and used 8-wavelength dense wavelength division multiplexing, or DWDM, along with roughly 50 to 64G NRZ modulation. NVIDIA’s latest “Plan B” instead moves to Tower Semiconductor’s silicon photonics platform. That setup uses 16-wavelength DWDM and 200G/400G PAM4 modulation, marking a clear change in the optical packaging and transmission approach described in the report. No additional timeline or reason for the switch was disclosed in the source item.