Today saw a number of announcements, but one that we wanted to focus on was that HPE is bringing the fruits of its Juniper Networks acquisition to its 2026 AI racks from AMD. Unlike NVIDIA, AMD does not makes its switch chips, instead opting for an open ecosystem. That means players like HPE can plug in their own networking solutions.
HPE brings Juniper Networking into its AMD Helios Rack-Scale AI Orbit
Just as a quick refresher, the AMD Helios AI rack takes 72 of the AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs and puts them into a rack as a scale-up domain.
At OCP 2025, we saw a reference AMD Helios rack as well as one from Meta. One of the notable differences was where the power and two levels of networking sit in the racks.
In both racks, the set of switches that handle the scale-up domain for inter-GPU traffic within the rack are found in the center trays. Meta has moved power out of its rack so it puts some of the scale-out networking switches into its flavor of the Helios rack.
In either case, the racks use a lot of switch silicon. What used to be enough switch bandwidth for several aisles of compute now is found in a single rack. HPE’s announcement said that its Juniper networking side is working with Broadcom to deliver the scale-up Ethernet switch for HPE’s Helios offerings.
I had no idea that Juniper was making a Tomahawk Ultra switch. I asked Patrick, and he said “I saw a Juniper Broadcom Tomahawk Ultra switch recently” and then he found photos. Here is the Juniper QFX5340-64OD from SC25:
Aside from the 64x OSFP ports, here are the management and timing interfaces to the switch:
Broadcom was also showing a Tomahawk Ultra latency demo, where the red line below shows NIC-to-NIC latency, and the blue line shows NIC-to-switch-to-NIC latency.
Broadcom was showing that its Tomahawk Ultra adds very little latency while adding the benefits of a switched architecture over a limited, directly connected topology.
Final Words
This is some big news as HPE is leveraging Juniper post-acquisition for the AI side. We knew Broadcom would be a big player on the switch silicon side and this gave us a reason to dig out some switch photos. NVIDIA will, of course, say that its NVLink architecture is superior to AMD’s open multi-vendor solution. Time will tell when we see those new Vera Rubin and AMD Helios racks come online in 2026.
