RDMA software market to reach 8.1 billion dollars by 2035

Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is transitioning from niche high-performance computing to a standard requirements for distributed video and AI infrastructure. By bypassing the CPU for data transfers, software-defined RDMA enables the massive throughput required for trillion-parameter AI models and 8K streaming workloads. For the streaming ecosystem, this means lower operational costs per transaction and higher density in edge nodes. However, the high integration complexity and lack of specialized networking talent remain significant hurdles for legacy operators. Watch for the emergence of standardized RDMA-over-Ethernet (RoCEv2) protocols to determine how quickly mid-market providers can adopt these performance gains.

The push toward RDMA-capable networking reflects a broader architectural shift toward disaggregated data centers. As reported by Next Platform in May 2026, the industry is increasingly moving away from traditional TCP/IP stacks for high-speed data movement because the 'TCP tax' on CPU cycles has become unsustainable for modern AI workloads. This trend was further validated by the Ultra Ethernet Coalition (UEC), which per Network World in March 2026, released its 1.0 specification aimed at providing an open, Ethernet-based alternative to InfiniBand that natively supports RDMA-like semantic features for large-scale GPU fabrics.

In the competitive hardware landscape, Broadcom and Marvell have accelerated the release of 800G and 1.6T switch silicon to handle the congestion management requirements of RDMA traffic. According to Barron's in April 2026, these advancements are critical for cloud providers like Google and Microsoft, who are struggling to maintain low-latency connections as their physical cluster sizes expand beyond 50,000 GPUs. Furthermore, recent filings from the InfiniBand Trade Association suggest that long-distance RDMA extensions are now being tested to link geographically distributed data centers, potentially allowing for real-time remote production and video processing without the latency penalties historically associated with metro-area networking.