AI Changed the Network: Inside the Ethernet Fabric Powering AI Infrastructure

AI is pushing networking into territory it has never seen before.In this episode of Built for Trust, Nick Lippis sits down with Hasan Siraj, Vice President of Products at Broadcom, to talk about how AI workloads are rewriting the rules of Ethernet, optics, and data center architecture.They dig into why AI traffic is fundamentally different from traditional TCP/IP traffic. Think massive elephant flows instead of self-balancing streams, and what that means for load balancing, congestion, and reliability at scale. Hasan breaks down the three distinct networking challenges AI infrastructure demands: scale up, scale out, and scale across, and why each requires a different approach.On the hardware side, Hasan walks through Broadcom's latest silicon, including the Tomahawk 6, the only 100-terabit switch in production today, and explains why co-packaged optics are achieving reliability 10x better than pluggable alternatives.For enterprises watching from the sidelines, Hasan makes the case that the same innovations powering hyperscale AI clusters are now accessible at the scale most organizations actually need.New episodes of the Built for Trust Podcast come out every Thursday. Subscribe to get notified.