By controlling the entire hardware stack, AWS can implement comprehensive security measures that would be challenging with third-party solutions, Rehder stated. “This initial long-haul deployment represents just the first implementation of the in-house technology across our extensive long-haul network. We have already extended deployment to Europe, with plans to use the AWS DWDM transponder for all new long-haul connections throughout our global infrastructure,” Rehder wrote. Cloud vendors are some of the largest optical users in the world, though not all develop their own DWDM or other optical systems, according to a variety of papers on the subject. Google develops its own DWDM, for example, but others like Microsoft Azure develop only parts and buy optical gear from third parties. Others such as IBM, Oracle and Alibaba have optical backbones but also utilize third-party equipment. “We are anticipating that the time has come to interconnect all those new AI data centers being built,” wrote Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell’Oro Group, in a recent optical report. “We are forecasting data center interconnect to grow at twice the rate of the overall market, driven by increased spending from cloud providers. The direct purchases of equipment for DCI will encompass ZR/ZR+ optics for IPoDWDM, optical line systems for transport, and DWDM systems for high-performance, long-distance terrestrial and subsea transmission.”

The world’s fourth exascale supercomputer has arrived, pitting Nvidia’s proprietary chip technologies against the x86 systems that have dominated supercomputing for decades. For the 66th edition of the TOP500, El Capitan holds steady at No. 1 while JUPITER Booster becomes the fourth exascale system on the list. The JUPITER Booster supercomputer, installed in Germany, uses Nvidia CPUs and GPUs and delivers a peak performance of exactly 1 exaflop, according to the November TOP500 list of supercomputers, released on Monday. The exaflop measurement is considered a major milestone in pushing computing performance to the limits. Today’s computers are typically measured in gigaflops and teraflops—and an exaflop translates to 1 billion gigaflops. Nvidia’s GPUs dominate AI servers installed in data centers as computing shifts to AI. As part of this shift, AI servers with Nvidia’s ARM-based Grace CPUs are emerging as a high-performance alternative to x86 chips. JUPITER is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, behind three systems with x86 chips from AMD and Intel, according to TOP500. The top three supercomputers on the TOP500 list are in the U.S. and owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The top two supercomputers—the 1.8-exaflop El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the 1.35-exaflop Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—use AMD CPUs and GPUs. The third-ranked 1.01-exaflop Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory uses Intel CPUs and GPUs. Intel scrapped its GPU roadmap after the release of Aurora and is now restructuring operations. The JUPITER Booster, which was assembled by France-based Eviden, has Nvidia’s GH200 superchip, which links two Nvidia Hopper GPUs with CPUs based on ARM designs. The CPU and GPU are connected via Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink interconnect, which is based on InfiniBand and provides bandwidth of up to 900 gigabytes per second. JUPITER first entered the Top500 list at 793 petaflops, but

Industry-wide price surge driven by AI Samsung is not alone in raising prices. In October, TrendForce reported that Samsung and SK Hynix raised DRAM and NAND flash prices by up to 30% for Q4. Similarly, SK Hynix said during its October earnings call that its HBM, DRAM, and NAND capacity is “essentially sold out” for 2026, with the company posting record quarterly operating profit exceeding $8 billion, driven by surging AI demand. Industry analysts attributed the price increases to manufacturers redirecting production capacity. HBM production for AI accelerators consumes three times the wafer capacity of standard DRAM, according to a TrendForce report, citing remarks from Micron’s Chief Business Officer. After two years of oversupply, memory inventories have dropped to approximately eight weeks from over 30 weeks in early 2023. “The memory industry is tightening faster than expected as AI server demand for HBM, DDR5, and enterprise SSDs far outpaces supply growth,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights. “Even with new fab capacity coming online, much of it is dedicated to HBM, leaving conventional DRAM and NAND undersupplied. Memory is shifting from a cyclical commodity to a strategic bottleneck where suppliers can confidently enforce price discipline.” This newfound pricing power was evident in Samsung’s approach to contract negotiations. “Samsung’s delayed pricing announcement signals tough behind-the-scenes negotiations, with Samsung ultimately securing the aggressive hike it wanted,” Rawat said. “The move reflects a clear power shift toward chipmakers: inventories are normalized, supply is tight, and AI demand is unavoidable, leaving buyers with little room to negotiate.” Charlie Dai, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, said the 60% increase “signals confidence in sustained AI infrastructure growth and underscores memory’s strategic role as the bottleneck in accelerated computing.” Servers to cost 10-25% more For enterprises building AI infrastructure, these supply dynamics translate directly into

“Based on this inspection, the NGFW creates a comprehensive, application-aware security policy. It then instructs the Arista fabric to enforce that policy at wire speed for all subsequent, similar flows,” Kotamraju wrote. “This ‘inspect-once, enforce-many’ model delivers granular zero trust security without the performance bottlenecks of hairpinning all traffic through a firewall or forcing a costly, disruptive network redesign.” The second capability is a dynamic quarantine feature that enables the Palo Alto NGFWs to identify evasive threats using Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS). “These services, such as Advanced WildFire for zero-day malware and Advanced Threat Prevention for unknown exploits, leverage global threat intelligence to detect and block attacks that traditional security misses,” Kotamraju wrote. The Arista fabric can intelligently offload trusted, high-bandwidth “elephant flows” from the firewall after inspection, freeing it to focus on high-risk traffic. When a threat is detected, the NGFW signals Arista CloudVision, which programs the network switches to automatically quarantine the compromised workload at hardware line-rate, according to Kotamraju: “This immediate response halts the lateral spread of a threat without creating a performance bottleneck or requiring manual intervention.” The third feature is unified policy orchestration, where Palo Alto Networks’ management plane centralizes zone-based and microperimeter policies, and CloudVision MSS responds with the offload and enforcement of Arista switches. “This treats the entire geo-distributed network as a single logical switch, allowing workloads to be migrated freely across cloud networks and security domains,” Srikanta and Barbieri wrote. Lastly, the Arista Validated Design (AVD) data models enable network-as-a-code, integrating with CI/CD pipelines. AVDs can also be generated by Arista’s AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) AI agents that incorporate best practices, testing, guardrails, and generated configurations. “Our integration directly resolves this conflict by creating a clean architectural separation that decouples the network fabric from security policy. This allows the NetOps team (managing the Arista

“There are very beefy workloads that you must have that performance for to run the enterprise,” he said. “The Fortune 500 mainstream enterprise customers are now … adopting Epyc faster than anyone. We’ve seen a 3x adoption this year. And what that does is drives back to the on-prem enterprise adoption, so that the hybrid multi-cloud is end-to-end on Epyc.” One of the key focus areas for AMD’s Epyc strategy has been our ecosystem build out. It has almost 180 platforms, from racks to blades to towers to edge devices, and 3,000 solutions in the market on top of those platforms. One of the areas where AMD pushes into the enterprise is what it calls industry or vertical workloads. “These are the workloads that drive the end business. So in semiconductors, that’s telco, it’s the network, and the goal there is to accelerate those workloads and either driving more throughput or drive faster time to market or faster time to results. And we almost double our competition in terms of faster time to results,” said McNamara. And it’s paying off. McNamara noted that over 60% of the Fortune 100 are using AMD, and that’s growing quarterly. “We track that very, very closely,” he said. The other question is are they getting new customer acquisitions, customers with Epyc for the first time? “We’ve doubled that year on year.” AMD didn’t just brag, it laid out a road map for the next two years, and 2026 is going to be a very busy year. That will be the year that new CPUs, both client and server, built on the Zen 6 architecture begin to appear. On the server side, that means the Venice generation of Epyc server processors. Zen 6 processors will be built on 2 nanometer design generated by (you guessed

When DartPoints CEO Scott Willis took the stage on “the Distributed Edge” panel at the 2025 Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, his message resonated across a room full of developers, operators, and hyperscale strategists: the future of AI infrastructure will be built far beyond the nation’s tier-one metros. On the latest episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, Willis expands on that thesis, mapping out how DartPoints has positioned itself for a moment when digital infrastructure inevitably becomes more distributed, and why that moment has now arrived. DartPoints’ strategy centers on what Willis calls the “regional edge”—markets in the Midwest, Southeast, and South Central regions that sit outside traditional cloud hubs but are increasingly essential to the evolving AI economy. These are not tower-edge micro-nodes, nor hyperscale mega-campuses. Instead, they are regional data centers designed to serve enterprises with colocation, cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-tenant cloud, DRaaS, and backup workloads, while increasingly accommodating the AI-driven use cases shaping the next phase of digital infrastructure. As inference expands and latency-sensitive applications proliferate, Willis sees the industry’s momentum bending toward the very markets DartPoints has spent years cultivating. Interconnection as Foundation for Regional AI Growth A key part of the company’s differentiation is its interconnection strategy. Every DartPoints facility is built to operate as a deeply interconnected environment, drawing in all available carriers within a market and stitching sites together through a regional fiber fabric. Willis describes fiber as the “nervous system” of the modern data center, and for DartPoints that means creating an interconnection model robust enough to support a mix of enterprise cloud, multi-site disaster recovery, and emerging AI inference workloads. The company is already hosting latency-sensitive deployments in select facilities—particularly inference AI and specialized healthcare applications—and Willis expects such deployments to expand significantly as regional AI architectures become more widely