Companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft and OpenAI have demonstrated industry leadership by introducing Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC), an RDMA transport protocol. MRC enables a single RDMA connection to distribute traffic across multiple network paths, improving throughput, load balancing and availability for large-scale AI training fabrics.

Think of it as replacing a single-lane road spanning a town with a cleverly laid-out street grid system paired with an on-the-fly traffic app, enabling drivers to reroute around slowdowns and road closures.

“Deploying MRC in the Blackwell generation was very successful and was made possible by a strong collaboration with NVIDIA,” said Sachin Katti, head of industrial compute at OpenAI. “MRC’s end-to-end approach enabled us to avoid much of the typical network-related slowdowns and interruptions and maintain the efficiency of frontier training runs at scale.”

In addition, Microsoft and NVIDIA have a longstanding collaboration focused on advancing the infrastructure required for the next generation of AI. Microsoft’s Fairwater and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI’s) Abilene data center, two of the largest AI factories purpose-built for training and deploying leading-edge frontier LLMs, rely on MRC to deliver on performance, scale and efficiency requirements. NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet is suited for this environment, helping provide the network foundation needed to run large-scale AI models and applications with confidence.