Huawei used its Hot Chips 2025 slot to introduce its UB-Mesh technology that is designed to unify all interconnections across AI data centers — both inside nodes and outside nodes — with a single protocol. The company also said that it will announce it is opening up the protocol for all users for free at its event next month. The technology is meant to replace PCIe, CXL, NVLink, and TCP/IP protocols with one single protocol to cut latency, control costs, and improve reliability in gigawatt-class datacenters. To push the initiative, Huawei plans to open-source the specification. But will it gain traction?
“Next month we have a conference, where we are going to announce that the UB-Mesh protocol will be published and disclosed to anybody like a free license,” said Heng Liao, chief scientist of HiSilicon, Huawei’s processor arm. “This is a very new technology; we are seeing competing standardization efforts from different camps. […] Depending on how successful we are in deploying actual systems and demand from partners and customers, we can talk about turning it into some kind of standard.”
From a cluster to SuperNode
While AI data centers for training and inference should perform like one big inherently parallel processor, they consist of individual racks, servers, CPUs, GPUs, memory, SSDs, NICs, switches, and other components that connect to each other using different buses and protocols, such as UPI, PCIe, CXL, RoCE, NVLink, UALink, TCP/IP, and upcoming Ultra Ethernet, just to name a few. Protocol conversions require power, increase latency and cost, and introduce potential points of failure, all factors that can scale catastrophically in gigawatt-class data centers with millions of processors.
Instead of juggling a plethora of links and protocols, Huawei proposes one unified framework called UB-Mesh that enables any port to talk to any other without translation. That simplicity cuts out conversion delays, streamlines design, and still leaves room to operate over Ethernet when needed, essentially converting the whole data center into a UB-Mesh-connected coherent SuperNode.
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Huawei defines SuperNode as a data center-scale AI architecture that unifies up to 1,000,000 processors (whether these are CPUs, GPUs, NPUs), pooled memory, SSDs, NICs, and switches into one system with per-chip bandwidth rising from 100 Gbps to 10 Tbps (1.25 TB/s, beyond what even PCIe 8.0 is set to provide), hop latency reduced from microseconds to ~150 ns, and overall design shifting from asynchronous DMA toward synchronous load/store semantics.
This structure is designed to lower latency, allow all high-speed SERDES connections to be reused flexibly, and even support operation over Ethernet for backward compatibility.
New technical challenges
However, Huawei admits that scaling this concept across a data center introduces new challenges, particularly the move from copper (which still connects inside the rack) to pluggable optical links. Fiber optics are unavoidable for long distances but comes with error rates that are way higher than electrical connections. To manage this, Huawei proposes link-level retry mechanisms, backup lanes within optical modules, and crossover designs that connect controllers to multiple modules. These measures are designed to ensure continuous operation even when individual links or modules fail, though they obviously increase costs.
The network topology in UB-Mesh is hybrid. At the top level, a CLOS structure would tie together racks across a hall. Beneath that, multi-dimensional meshes would link tens of nodes inside each rack. This hybrid model is meant to avoid the runaway expense of conventional designs as systems grow to tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes.
Also, reliability has to be implemented beyond individual links. Huawei outlined a system model where hot-spare racks automatically take over when another rack fails. Then faulty racks are repaired and rotated back in to maintain availability. This design extends mean time between failures by orders of magnitude, a scale of improvement necessary for million-chip systems, according to Huawei.
Lower costs
From a cost perspective, the difference is stark, based on data from Huawei. Traditional interconnects tend to see linear growth in costs as the number of nodes increases, which means that they can eventually eclipse the price of AI accelerators (such as Nvidia’s H100 or B200) themselves. UB-Mesh, by contrast, scales in a sub-linear fashion, adding capacity without proportionally increasing cost. Huawei even pointed to a practical 8,192-node system combining CLOS and 2D mesh elements as proof of feasibility.
Strategic implications
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With UB-Mesh and the SuperNode, Huawei is offering a systems-level architecture designed to support massive AI clusters in China and abroad. If the technologies take off, then Huawei will reduce (or rather cease) dependence on Western standards like PCIe, NVLink, UALink, and even TCP/IP inside its next-generation data centers. Rather than competing with AMD, Intel, and Nvidia on CPUs, GPUs, or even rack-scale solutions, Huawei is trying to build a data center-scale offering.
But the question is, will the initiative be adopted by anyone beyond Huawei, as it remains to be seen whether the company’s customers will be interested in getting their data center infrastructure from a single supplier. To that end, Huawei is opening up the UB-Mesh link protocol for the world to evaluate. If Huawei is successful with its own deployments and there is enough interest from third parties, then it can turn UB-Mesh into a standard and perhaps even standardize the SuperNode architecture itself.
However, it remains to be seen whether the industry is interested. Nvidia relies on its own NVLink connections inside the rack and Ethernet or InfiniBand across the data center. Other companies like AMD, Broadcom, and Intel are pushing UALink for inter-pod communications and Ultra Ethernet for data center-wide connections. Both technologies are standardized and supported by a wide range of companies, enabling flexibility and reducing costs.
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