Specifications

Overview

The Broadcom Thor Ultra is the industry's first 800G AI Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) to fully comply with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specification, designed to interconnect hundreds of thousands of XPUs for trillion-parameter AI workloads. It adopts the open UEC standard so AI clusters can scale on standards-based Ethernet rather than proprietary fabrics.

Thor Ultra targets the bottlenecks that constrain traditional RDMA at hyperscale, adding packet-level multipathing, out-of-order data placement, hardware SACK-based retransmission, and a fully programmable congestion-control pipeline. The result is faster, more efficient and more open Ethernet-based AI fabrics.

The NIC ships in two SerDes configurations — eight 100G lanes or four 200G lanes — both delivering 800G aggregate bandwidth through 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 6, and is available in chiplet, IP, PCIe, and OCP 3.0 card form factors. It integrates natively with Broadcom Tomahawk 6 and any UEC-compliant switch, and was presented by Broadcom at Hot Chips 2026.