SAN FRANCISCO, June 3 (Reuters) - Broadcom ( AVGO ) has

begun to ship its latest networking chip that aims to speed AI,

the company said on Tuesday.

The chip, called the Tomahawk 6, boasts double the

performance compared with the prior version and other traffic

control features that make the networking chip significantly

more efficient, Ram Velaga, a Broadcom ( AVGO ) senior vice president,

told Reuters in a Monday interview.

The speed boost means that fewer networking switches are

needed to perform the same task, Velaga said.

Broadcom's ( AVGO ) networking chips have gained increased importance

because of AI. When constructing the necessary data centers for

AI applications, infrastructure builders must string together

hundreds or thousands of chips.

Building large-scale clusters of networked chips requires

specialized networking gear and chips, of which the Tomahawk

series of processors is one such component.

With the Tomahawk 6, Broadcom's ( AVGO ) engineers have boosted its

speed and capabilities to the point where it can be used to

construct the larger data centers that are necessary for AI,

which can be over 100,000 graphics processors (GPUs) strung

together, Velaga said.

"In a couple of years, you will start to see a million GPUs

housed inside a physical building," he said.

Broadcom's ( AVGO ) networking chips use the Ethernet networking

protocol, which has been a networking standard for decades.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) produces hardware that uses a rival tech called

InfiniBand and several products based on Ethernet.

"All of these networks can be very simply done on Ethernet,

you don't need esoteric technologies," Velaga said.

The Tomahawk 6 is the first product in that line that will use

several chips combined into a single package, a tech known as

chiplets that is widely adopted by other chip designers such as

Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ). Adding chiplets roughly doubled

the amount of silicon area used in the design, Velaga said.

Broadcom ( AVGO ) is producing the Tomahawk switch on Taiwan

Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's ( TSM ) three nanometer process.