Part of the day: NVLink copper spine / backplane cartridges

Assembled by the nightly build from this catalog’s own entry for NVLink copper spine / backplane cartridges (3.10, Layer 3 — Networking & interconnect). The tables below are rebuilt every night; first published 2026-09-13, refreshed 2026-09-24.

The copper cable assemblies and backplane cartridges that physically wire the scale-up fabric together inside a rack, most visible in Nvidia’s NVL72 architecture.

NVLink copper spine and backplane cartridges are the physical layer under the scale-up fabric of 3.01, wiring GPU compute trays to NVLink switch trays inside a rack — the taxonomy notes roughly 5,000 copper cables in an NVL72-class rack. That cable count is itself the reason the industry is evaluating co-packaged optics (3.08) as a replacement at the next speed generation: as per-GPU bandwidth rises, all-copper backplanes start running into reach and density limits that pushing more copper doesn’t solve. Several connector and cable assembly makers supply this content, generally under reference-design partner arrangements with the rack architect rather than as a fully open market. An investor should watch this layer as a bellwether for the copper-to-optical transition inside the rack: continued growth in cable count per rack favors incumbent copper suppliers, while an early shift to CPO would cap that growth sooner than volume trends alone would suggest.

AI delta: Larger scale-up domains push cable count per rack higher, up to the point where copper’s reach and density limits at the highest speeds make an optical alternative necessary.

Who makes it

The full entry — sub-categories, news, videos and sources — lives on the NVLink copper spine / backplane cartridges page.