MRC and SRv6: How Foundational Networking Innovations Are Enabling the Next Generation of AI Supercomputers
Cisco, Thursday, May 14th, 2026
The recent announcement of the Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) protocol, developed by OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Broadcom, represents a major advancement in AI infrastructure. This deployment shows that full bisection bandwidth and near-perfect uptime are achievable at a scale of over 100,000 GPUs, a key milestone for training advanced models.
This announcement is notable not only for its scale but also for its architectural choices. MRC is built on SRv6 (RFC 8986), and its success highlights how foundational SRv6 innovation has enabled this achievement. Cisco has been a primary architect of SRv6 from the beginning - co-authoring the core IETF standards (RFC 8402, RFC 8754, RFC 8986) and has started shipping products as early as 2019 with large-scale deployments such as SoftBank.
Cisco also played a major role in driving the ongoing SRv6 AI backend work in the IETF and has been embedding SRv6 across our silicon and platforms. The paper 'Resilient AI Supercomputer Networking using MRC and SRv6' offers a detailed technical overview and is recommended reading.