NCP-AII is the professional-level exam in NVIDIA's infrastructure track. It runs 120 minutes, has about 70 to 75 questions, costs $400 and is valid for two years. It is remotely proctored through Certiverse. NVIDIA asks for two to three years of operational experience in a data centre with NVIDIA hardware, and it means it. The five domains are cluster test and verification (33%), system and server bring-up (31%), control plane installation and configuration (19%), troubleshoot and optimize (12%) and physical layer management (5%).
I like this weighting. Anyone who has stood up a GPU cluster knows that most of the pain is in burn-in, fabric validation and chasing the one node that underperforms, and the exam puts two thirds of its weight there. The catch is that this is an NVIDIA hardware exam. It is not a general AI infrastructure credential, and if your shop runs AMD Instinct or rents capacity from a cloud provider, much of what it tests will not apply. It is also tough to study for on your own.
The official prep is a self-paced fundamentals course and a multi-day instructor-led workshop, but no course replaces time on an actual DGX or HGX system, and that access is the real barrier to entry. Search interest for NVIDIA infrastructure certification is small but has roughly tripled over the past year, which fits the hiring market for people who can run these clusters. My view: it is a credible credential for a narrow, well-paid job. Get your employer to fund it, sit NCA-AIIO first if you need a stepping stone, and do not expect it to mean much outside NVIDIA environments.