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AI's Invisible Bottleneck: Why AI Stalls at the Network, not the GPU
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For many, AI success isn’t limited by how many GPUs you can buy; it’s limited by how fast those GPUs can talk to each other without tripping over the plumbing. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, two of WWT’s top networking minds —Justin van Schaik and Eric Fairfield — lay out the real choke points slowing AI projects to a crawl and how powerful, modernized network architectures are quietly rewriting the rulebook for scaling AI.
Support for this episode is provided by: Nokia
Learn more about this week's guest:
Justin van Shaik is a Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology, specializing in High Performance Networking, AI and Open Networking. A seasoned technologist, he helps organizations design and deploy advanced infrastructure to support next-gen workloads at scale.
Justin's top pick: The Future of High Performance Networking: Ultra Ethernet Explained
Eric Fairfield is a Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology with a passion for solving data center networking challenges. He specializes in Cisco ACI, VMware NSX and their integration. Outside of tech, Eric has spent over 30 years immersed in motorsports, working with F1, IndyCar, IMSA and other major racing organizations.
Eric's top pick: WWT at ONUG AI Networking Summit—Dallas 2025
The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.
Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.
The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.
Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.
Chapters
1. Networks as the AI Bottleneck (00:00:00)
2. Networking Evolution for AI Workloads (00:06:22)
3. Ultra-Ethernet and RDMA Explained (00:11:21)
4. NVIDIA and Cisco Partnership (00:17:27)
5. The AI Proving Ground Advantage (00:25:11)
6. AI Enhancing Network Operations (00:31:32)
7. Episode Conclusion and Key Takeaways (00:38:07)
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