How AI Is Changing the Network(s)

As is always the case, this started with a simple question: Will AI change how networks work? Will it impact the speeds we need at home and on our phones?

My assumption was that AI would accelerate this — personal AI agents querying the cloud all day, your house talking constantly to a model (or models). A lot of this is still wishful thinking.

My attempt to find an answer led me down a whole new path of inquiry, with surprising results. The real action is happening far away from the madding consumer crowds. None of this was surprising, considering I have covered the evolution of the internet and its innards since the early 1990s.

Internet 1.0, Internet 2.0, the cloud, mobile, data and machine learning, and now AI are all part of a continuum that has challenged and scaled the network, helped evolve new technologies, and introduced new ways of thinking about ever-expanding oceans of data.

AI is only supersizing everything, including the sheer scale of capital it needs to build competitive advantage. It is also bringing down the curtain on some of the old ways of thinking about the cloud, data centers, and networks. If my old publication were still around, we would be writing about all of this and more.

Over the past few weeks, with help from old friends in the networking and infrastructure world, I have managed to put together a 5,000-word overview of the changes to the network. I look at the physical pipes, the shifting demand profile, and who really owns this new internet.

It is by no means complete — nor is it meant to be. Instead, it is an anchoring essay for you to think beyond the dollars and the hype machine of AI, and see that this is just tech doing tech things at a scale we have never seen before.

Continue reading my essay, “Say Hello to the Internet of AI.”