Dell'Oro's Sameh Boujelbene: AI is changing data center hardware

3/17/2023

Just like every other part of the communications landscape, data center networking is changing fast. Sameh Boujelbene, vice president at Dell'Oro Group, projects that we'll see most data center switch sales coming at 400 Gbit/s and higher speeds in the next few years – and AI is a huge catalyst for that capacity push.

In this podcast, we discuss how AI workloads, which have hardware and latency requirements that are different from traditional enterprise cloud workloads, will influence hardware design and data center topologies in the future.

Since this podcast was recorded last week on-site at OFC in San Diego, we discuss the role of coherent pluggable optics and co-packaged optics in the evolution of data center hardware.

Here are some topics we covered:

How the cloud and AI as emerging market segments are influencing data center networking (02:03)
Cloud providers will be looking at both network topology and next-gen data center optics to accommodate the demands of AI workloads (05:07)
It's early, but we could see AI-related computing requiring its own class of connectivity and computing options, much the same way cloud did a decade or so ago (10:13)
Optical networking innovations in the data center will make a huge difference in power consumption and data transmission rates for the next several years (14:40)

For an unedited transcript of this podcast, click the closed caption button in the video toolbar.