Mellanox already kind of controlled Infiniband so Intel/QLogic could either chase Mellanox or fork and IMO forking into Omni-Path wasn't necessarily a bad choice. Omni-Path got zero adoption but that could have been for any number of reasons.
So many customers have a mental block against anything that isn't called Ethernet so the industry cannot "just use Infiniband"; they really had no choice but to create UEC. I would predict that Broadcom ends up de facto controlling UEC since their market share is much higher than Nvidia and people now want anything but Nvidia to create competition.
I doubt anyone had a mental block against anything that was not Ethernet given that Infiniband had been taking market share from Ethernet since Nvidia acquired Mellanox in HPC if we go by the top 500 list:
Nvidia announced the acquisition of Mellanox on March 11, 2019. In June 2019, Ethernet had 54.4% market share to infiniband’s 24.6%. NVIDIA completed their acquisition of Mellanox on April 27, 2020. In June 2025, Ethernet had 33.4% marketshare to infiniband’s 54.2%. Note that I combined the Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet fields when getting the data. It would be interesting if I could find broader market data comparing Ethernet and Infiniband, but that is hard to find since people stopped comparing them long ago when Infiniband famously retreated into HPC and Ethernet took over everywhere else. The only thing I could find was an advertisement of a paywalled analyst report, which says:
> When we first initiated our coverage of AI Back-end Networks in late 2023, the market was dominated by InfiniBand, holding over 80 percent share
They express optimism that Ethernet will overtake Infiniband, but the full rationale for that is not publicly accessible. It also does not say outside of the paywall to what extent that market share taken by Ethernet would be maintained by Nvidia. Another article I found gives a hint. It shows Nvidia is gaining market share rapidly in Ethernet switches:
The numbers on Ethernet switches are not showing “people now want anything but Nvidia to create competition”. Instead, they show that there is a competitive market, Nvidia is the current driver of competition in the market, and there is amazing demand for Ethernet switches from Nvidia over switches from the incumbents, who were behind UEC. Broadcom appears to be included under others there.
The public data that I can find largely does not support what you said.
I feel like the application of “the market wants alternatives to Nvidia” to networking could turn out similarly to how “people want a physical keyboard” turned out in smartphones.
In the networking market, Nvidia is the underdog. Anyone who wants alternatives there is going to Nvidia, not away from Nvidia. We will see how the market develops, but I do not think widely stated remarks about Nvidia in AI training apply to Nvidia in networking.
So many customers have a mental block against anything that isn't called Ethernet so the industry cannot "just use Infiniband"; they really had no choice but to create UEC. I would predict that Broadcom ends up de facto controlling UEC since their market share is much higher than Nvidia and people now want anything but Nvidia to create competition.