Converged North-South Networks: The Critical Path For AI Success
Cisco, Friday, February 20th, 2026
When we talk about building AI data centers, east-west GPU fabrics often steal the spotlight. But there's another traffic path that's just as critical: north-south connectivity. In today's AI environments, how your data center ingests data and delivers results at scale can make or break your AI strategy.
AI is no longer a siloed project tucked away in an isolated cluster. Enterprises are rapidly evolving to deliver AI as a shared service, pulling in massive volumes of data from external sources and serving results to users, applications, and downstream systems. This AI-driven traffic generates the bursty, high-bandwidth north-south flows that characterize modern AI environments:...