“The market has enough money to allow f*ckwits like Musk to borrow enough to buy Twitter, eh?”
When someone lives in your head rent free.

Well, Cisco ate one of the InfiniBand vendors, and Mellanox itself ate Voltaire way back when. Technically, Cornelis Networks is a vendor of InfiniBand, having bought the Intel Omni-Path business and trying to get it back on a reasonable roadmap. So there are two, sort of. But it will take Cornelis time to get more traction.

There used to be several sources of Infiniband cards and switches. At least three IIRC. It is not owned lock, stock and intellectual property by nVidia. So what happened, Intel gobbled up one maker and canned it, standard Intel behaviour. nVidia gobbled up another, and where is the third?

If the market needs more IB makers, surely the market can come up with the money to stand one or three up. The market has enough money to allow f*ckwits like Musk to borrow enough to buy Twitter, eh?

I think the correct sequence was Nick McKeown and team at Stanford invented it, Google loved it and used it, and then Nick co-founded Barefoot Networks.

That is a valid point, just an accidental omission. We are, of course, quite familiar with Slingshot, and it is, of course, an HPC variant of Ethernet. It remains to be seen how well it does on AI training at scale, but presumably well with Frontier, El Capitan, and Aurora all using it at exascale. Slingshot could do very well on HPC and average or very well on AI. We shall see.