Just a few decades ago, building a data center largely meant refining an established formula. Even as infrastructure evolved and facilities grew larger, the underlying architecture remained familiar.
Put simply, compute sat at the center, networking connected it together, and the physical layer evolved steadily alongside both. The rapid rise of AI has rewritten this familiar rulebook.
Beneath the surface of the most visible developments defining modern AI deployments – from GPUs, power and land availability, to increasingly advanced cooling systems – the architecture of the network itself is being reimagined.
“There is no one single AI architecture,” says Dr. Alan Keizer, senior technical advisor at AFL. “The complexity and variations are proliferating.”
Instead of one dominant blueprint that can be relied upon across multiple data center deployments, in its place is an increasingly diverse collection of specialized architectures.
