The latest report from Crehan Research, which examines the global market for branded data center Ethernet switches, says 800G products played a significant role in reversing two straight quarters of decline, to 7% year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2024.
The market researcher the “strong ramp of 800 GbE data center switch deployments” a “key contributor to the growth,” pointing out that the 800G hardware provides the network fabric for AI compute clusters.
“This strong start supports the expectation that 800 GbE will see the fastest-ever data center Ethernet switch ramp speed,” the researcher predicts.
“The data center Ethernet switch market year-over-year revenue growth was particularly impressive, given the backlog order fulfillment that was still happening a year ago following pandemic-related supply constraints,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “Generative AI networking investments are having a rapid and meaningful market impact as cloud service providers deploy the highest-available Ethernet networking speeds to handle the bandwidth demands of these workloads.”
In early 2024, Crehan first predicted the sharp growth curve for 800G Ethernet switches that is reflected in the chart on this page. At that time Crehan said these switches “will surpass 20 million ports in annual shipments within four years.”
Seamus Crehan explained, “Generative AI is potentially the biggest killer application to emerge in decades. As the de-facto data center networking technology, with an installed base of over 400 million switch ports as well as the proven ability to incorporate additional features to handle the requirements of new applications, we expect Ethernet to be the main enabler of these workloads.
Along with its most recent report, Crehan Research further pointed out that 400-GbE network interface cards (NICs), which were the highest-speed Ethernet NICs widely available as of Q3 2024, “also posted very strong results during the quarter, with shipments growing six-fold year-over-year due to large increases in both foundational/performance NIC and DPU/IPU [data processing unit/infrastructure processing unit] volumes.”
