Part of the day: Switch systems & white-box ODMs

Assembled by the nightly build from this catalog’s own entry for Switch systems & white-box ODMs (3.03, Layer 3 — Networking & interconnect). The tables below are rebuilt every night; first published 2026-09-06, refreshed 2026-09-24.

The physical switches — built by branded vendors and white-box ODMs — that house scale-out switch ASICs and connect racks into a cluster fabric.

Switch systems take the ASICs from 3.02 and package them into deployable network hardware, connecting to the transceivers and cabling in 3.04–3.11 on one side and to server NICs on the other. The market splits between branded systems from established networking vendors and white-box designs built by ODMs to hyperscaler specifications, a split that mirrors how hyperscalers buy compute servers. AI buildouts favor white-box and merchant-silicon designs where hyperscalers want to control their own network software stack, while branded systems remain common in enterprise and smaller AI deployments that value a single vendor’s support. An investor should watch how this branded-versus-white-box mix shifts with buyer type, since it changes who captures margin on a switch system versus who merely captures the ASIC or optics content inside it.

AI delta: Hyperscale AI clusters increasingly specify white-box switch systems built to their own designs around merchant silicon, shifting share away from fully branded switch platforms.

Who makes it

The full entry — sub-categories, news, videos and sources — lives on the Switch systems & white-box ODMs page.