Artificial Intelligence
Article

Faster, Smarter, Cheaper: The Networking Revolution Powering Generative AI

by
Arista Networks
April 1, 2025
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Summary

Automation Alley member Arista Networks showcases the often overlooked role of networking in a world increasingly defined by generative AI and processing power.

AI models have rapidly evolved from GPT-2 (1.5B parameters) in 2019 to models like GPT-4 (1+ trillion parameters) and DeepSeek-V3 (671B parameters, using Mixture-of-Experts). More parameters enhance context understanding and text/image generation but increase computational demands. Modern AI is now multimodal, handling text, images, audio, and video (e.g., GPT-4V, Gemini), and task-specific, fine-tuned for applications like drug discovery, financial modeling or coding. As AI models continue to scale and evolve, they require massive parallel computing, specialized hardware (GPUs, TPUs), and crucially, optimized networking to ensure efficient training and inference.

While computational power is an essential factor in AI development, optimized networking has emerged as a key enabler for maximizing AI efficiency and economic feasibility of large-scale AI initiatives.

The Hidden Costs of Suboptimal Networking

Many organizations diving into generative AI deployments focus primarily on computational power, often overlooking the crucial role of networking.

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Arista Networks
Arista Networks

Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client to cloud networking for large data center/AI, campus and routing environments. Arista’s award-winning platforms deliver availability, agility, automation, analytics and security through an advanced network operating stack Arista was founded by industry luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, Ken Duda and David Cheriton, launched in 2008 and is led by CEO Jayshree Ullal. Its seasoned leadership team is globally recognized as respected leaders and visionaries with a rich and extensive history in networking and innovation. The company went public in June 2014, is listed with NYSE (ANET), and currently has more than 10,000+ cloud customers worldwide and has deployed 100M ports.

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