By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-03-12 15:01:00
The numbers that Bill Gartner, Cisco’s SVP and GM of optical systems and optics, uses to describe AI’s impact on bandwidth tell a stunning story about how much is changing in the network and the data center.
The three horsemen of this particular AI revelation are called scale up, scale out and scale across.
Scale up networking, the connections within a single AI compute rack, requires 504 times the bandwidth of a traditional WAN link, according to Cisco’s data. Gartner’s info said that scale out networking, which connects racks within a data center, runs at 56 times the baseline. Finally, scale across, the inter-data-center connectivity that kicks in when a single facility runs out of power or space for a growing GPU cluster, comes in at 14 times.
“It is mind boggling that this is happening at this rate,” Gartner told Light Reading earlier this week. “Every month, things get dramatically better. Those models are getting better because there are more GPUs working to make them…