How we evolved Google’s global and data center networks for the AI era (opens in new tab)

Over the last 25 years of building Google’s global network, we’ve navigated major architectural eras — from the Internet, to streaming, and the cloud. Today, we are squarely in the midst of a fourth: the AI era. The applications in the AI era are fundamentally different from the consumer and enterprise applications of the previous eras and impose a set of novel and demanding requirements — on compute resources, of course, but also on the network. Consider the fundamental physical challenge, w...