Recently, the Ultra-Accelerated Link (UALink) Alliance announced that tech giants Apple, Alibaba, and semiconductor intellectual property supplier Synopsys have officially joined its board. This development marks an increasing industry support for open standards and may challenge the current closed ecosystem led by Nvidia.
UALink is an efficient interconnect standard designed to optimize AI cluster performance, capable of connecting hundreds to thousands of accelerators. Since its establishment in October 2024, the UALink Alliance has grown to 65 members, including major industry players like AMD, Intel, Google, AWS, and Microsoft. Notably, Nvidia has not yet joined the alliance and continues to develop its proprietary technology, NVLink.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, image licensed by Midjourney
Becky Loop, Apple's Director of Architecture Platforms, stated, "UALink shows great potential in addressing connectivity challenges and enhancing AI capabilities." As AI workloads continue to grow, efficient communication between accelerators becomes crucial. The UALink 1.0 specification is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2025, enabling connections of up to 1,024 accelerators with a transmission speed of 200 Gbps per channel.
Qiang Liu, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Computing, emphasized the perspective of cloud computing: "Promoting interconnection technology for AI computing accelerators at scale is of significant value for building competitive intelligent computing super nodes." As AI continues to evolve, open standards in infrastructure will provide businesses with more choices and potential cost reductions. Open standards typically increase competition among hardware providers, leading to more interoperability solutions.
Richard Solomon, Senior Product Manager at Synopsys, pointed out that UALink will play a key role in meeting the performance and bandwidth communication needs of hyperscale data centers. As AI gradually permeates various industries, who can gain an advantage in hardware connection standards will determine the speed and cost efficiency of organizations as they scale their AI operations. Today, more and more tech giants are working together to support UALink, suggesting a collective vote of confidence in the future of openness and interoperability in the industry.
