The Hyper Accelerated Link (UALink) Alliance has recently welcomed heavyweight members: Apple, Alibaba and Sanosese to officially join its board of directors. This signals greater support for open standards in the AI field, and also heralds a potential challenge to the existing closed ecosystem, especially Nvidia’s NVLink. The UALink Alliance is committed to optimizing AI cluster performance. Its efficient interconnection standards can connect hundreds or even thousands of accelerators. Since its establishment in October 2024, the number of members has grown to 65, covering AMD, Intel, Google, AWS, Industry giants such as Microsoft. The active participation of alliance members will undoubtedly promote the rapid development of AI computing accelerator interconnection technology.
UALink is an efficient interconnect standard designed to optimize AI cluster performance and can connect hundreds to thousands of accelerators together. Since its establishment in October 2024, the members of the UALink Alliance have grown to 65, including many industry giants such as AMD, Intel, Google, AWS and Microsoft. It is worth noting that Nvidia has not joined the alliance and is still developing its proprietary technology NVLink.
"UALink shows tremendous potential to solve connectivity challenges and expand AI capabilities," said Becky Loop, Apple's director of architectural platforms. As AI workloads grow, efficient communication between accelerators becomes more important. is particularly critical. The UALink 1.0 specification is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2025, enabling connections of up to 1,024 accelerators and a transmission speed of 200Gbps per channel.
Qiang Liu, Vice President of Alibaba Cloud Computing, emphasized the perspective of cloud computing: "Promoting AI computing accelerator scale interconnection technology is of great value to building the competitiveness of intelligent computing super nodes." With the continuous evolution of AI, the development of infrastructure Open standards will provide businesses with more choices and potential cost reductions. Open standards often increase competition among hardware providers, leading to more interoperable solutions.
Richard Solomon, senior product manager at Cynoses, pointed out that UALink will play a key role in meeting the performance and bandwidth communication needs of hyperscale data centers. As AI gradually penetrates all walks of life, whoever gets the upper hand in hardware connectivity standards will determine how quickly and cost-effectively organizations can scale their AI operations. Today, more and more technology giants are coming together to support UALink, and the industry seems to be casting a vote of confidence in future openness and interoperability.
The joining of Apple, Alibaba and Cenoses has undoubtedly enhanced the strength of the UALink alliance and injected new vitality into the development of open standardization in the AI field. In the future, the application and development of UALink deserves continued attention, and its impact on the AI industry landscape will become increasingly apparent.