When AI Traffic Hits the Data Center: Why Cloud Networks Are Being Rebuilt From the Wires Up
Picture a city whose streets were designed for commuters — steady morning and evening flows, predictable peaks, occasional traffic jams that clear themselves within an hour. Then, overnight, that city starts hosting daily freight convoys: hundreds of trucks that must all leave the warehouse district at the exact same second, travel in lockstep, and arrive together, because if even one truck is late, the entire convoy has to stop and wait. That is roughly what has happened inside the networks that power cloud computing over the last few years, as AI training and inference workloads have moved in alongside ordinary web traffic.