As the use of AI by businesses and individuals continues to grow exponentially, service providers are racing to supercharge their AI service offerings. AI technologies such as DeepSeek, agentic AI and xAI’s Grok 3 are developing quickly, bringing new challenges and opportunities. The processing demands for AI make AI data centers significantly more complex than conventional data centers. They require large clusters of AI accelerators (xPUs) with host servers and memory connected by multiple high speed networks.
AI data center optimization is a key focus for service providers as they continue building out AI processing and networking capacity. In the new Heavy Reading (now part of Omdia) AI Cluster Networking Service Provider Survey, conducted during March and April 2025, respondents were asked about the benefits of AI data center optimization. Respondents indicated that getting more out of the infrastructure without spending additional investment and improving reliability for workload completion were the two most significant benefits of optimizing an AI network. They also considered reducing power and achieving more reliable outcomes to be important.