Embodiments of this application provide a packet forwarding method, a route sending and receiving method, and related apparatus. The method is applied to a data center in a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. The data center includes a server and a network device, and the server includes a first NUMA node and a second NUMA node. The method includes: The first interface processing unit (IPU) receives a first packet from the network device, where the first packet is a packet to be sent to the first virtual machine in the first NUMA node. The first IPU sends the first packet to the first virtual machine. The second IPU receives a second packet from the network device, where the second packet is a packet to be sent to the second virtual machine in the second NUMA node. The second IPU sends the second packet to the second virtual machine.