The articles in this special section focus on high performance interconnects. In this issue, you will find the best papers on the hottest, most cutting edge interconnects design occurring in industry and academia from this year’s IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects (Hot Interconnects). Like our sister conference, Hot Chips, Hot Interconnects is a choice venue for revealing the latest and greatest advances in hardware. This year at Hot Interconnects was different than past events as it was virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hot Interconnects attendance was excellent, welcoming approximately 1000 attendees. This year at Hot Interconnects we were pleased to welcome talks from network leaders from NVIDIA, AWS, Ayar Labs, and GigaIO. NVIDIA’s CTO Michael Kagan laid out a case arguing that “Data center is a computer.” Brian Barrett talked about the challenges of designing network technologies for AWS. Scott Taylor from GigaIO and Mark Wade from Ayar Labs introduced new network technologies.