data center networking

Microsoft said on May 5, 2026, that 11 papers by its researchers and collaborators were accepted at NSDI ’26, the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation taking place May 4–6 in Renton, Washington. The announcement is not merely academic bragging rights. It is a map of...

Microsoft’s lab in Cambridge has a simple pitch: swap expensive, power-hungry lasers for mass-produced MicroLEDs and pair them with imaging fiber to carry thousands of parallel light channels, and you can radically cut the energy, cost and fragility of the short-range links that glue modern AI...

Cisco’s president Jeetu Patel says the company has already shipped a product whose code was written entirely by AI — and he expects at least half a dozen more such products by the end of 2026 — a claim that shifts the enterprise software conversation from “assistive AI” to “agent-driven...

Cisco’s move into servers marks one of the most consequential product launches in the company’s history: the Unified Computing System (UCS) bundles compute, networking, storage access, and virtualization into a single, policy-driven platform and it arrived with an unusually broad ecosystem of...

Latham & Watkins told its more than 400 first‑year associates in a mandatory two‑day “AI Academy” that artificial intelligence is not optional—it's now part of standard legal practice, and mastery of the tools will be a core expectation of modern lawyering. Background The training weekend in...

OpenAI’s deal with Broadcom to co-develop and deploy custom AI accelerators marks a decisive escalation in the race to control the computing backbone of generative AI — a strategic pivot that promises higher performance and lower marginal cost for the company’s large language models, while also...

Cisco’s new Silicon One P200 chip and the 8223 routing system mark a strategic push to make geographically distributed data centres operate like a single, gigantic AI computer — promising massive throughput, much lower power draw, and the buffering required to keep AI training jobs coherent...

The hollowing-out of fiber optics just passed an important milestone: a research team tied to Microsoft and the University of Southampton has reported a hollow‑core optical fiber design that both lowers signal loss below the long‑standing practical floor for silica fiber and propagates light...

Microsoft’s move into hollow‑core optical fiber signals a potential inflection point for high‑speed networking: lab and limited field results show an air‑core design with measured attenuation as low as 0.091 dB/km at 1,550 nm, a substantially lower loss than the practical floor of modern silica...

Microsoft and the University of Southampton have published what the teams describe as a watershed result in optical communications: a hollow‑core optical fiber with measured attenuation of 0.091 dB/km at 1,550 nm, a performance level that — if reproduced in production volumes and field...