Netflash

As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don’t want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that’s what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wrocław into the municipal district heating network. Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipa…

As enterprises look for ways to cut the cost of running AI models in production, AMD is betting that not every AI workload will be best served by a power-hungry general-purpose GPU. AMD has agreed to buy Taalas, the Canadian designer of chips that permanently embed a trained AI model’s weights into custom silicon, instead of repeatedly loading them from memory during inference as conventional GPU…

Enterprises deploying agentic AI may need a new generation of AI servers as conventional GPU-centric infrastructure struggles to efficiently execute multi-step AI workflows, according to researchers from Microsoft Azure and the University of Texas at Austin. Drawing on production telemetry from Microsoft’s Azure cloud and experiments with representative open-source agent frameworks, the researche…

For decades, Network Address Translation (NAT) has been the default way IP addresses are provided inside larger networks, as a means to deal with the challenges of IPv4 address availability. The basic premise behind NAT is that private addresses stay private, but that assumption might not be entirely accurate anymore (if it ever really was). At Black Hat USA 2026 , researcher Malcolm Stagg , an i…

Ready to travel to gain hands-on experience with new networking and infrastructure tools? Tech conferences give attendees a chance to access product demos, network with peers, earn continuing education credits, and catch a celebrity keynote or live entertainment. Check out our calendar of upcoming network, I&O, and data center conferences, and let us know if we’re missing any of your favorites. A…

AWS has added AI Insights to AWS Marketplace, a feature that it says is designed to help CIOs and developers better evaluate and compare products using AI-generated summaries and recommendations as enterprises grapple with increasing pressure to justify technology spending. “Available in the pricing section of the listing in AWS Marketplace, AI Insights explains each product’s pricing in plain la…

Arista Networks shared some good news about its earnings and future directions during its second-quarter earnings call this week. For starters, Arista reported its first-ever $3 billion quarter. The company logged revenue of $3.036 billion, an increase of 12.1% compared to the first quarter of 2026, and an increase of 37.7% from the second quarter of 2025. Just five years ago, Arista reported $2.…

Data released at this week’s Black Hat security conference suggests the era of manual zero-day hunting and 50-day patch windows is coming to an end. This is a double-edged sword for security professionals: Vulnerabilities can now be found at machine speed, perhaps bringing the discovery time eventually to zero, but it also means that AI-driven threats require autonomous operations to protect the …

ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on internet and cloud traffic performance. Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, includ…

A likely US administration ban on Chinese optical transceivers for AI data centers may have an unintended consequence: IT will rush to buy as many of the components as possible before restrictions kick in. Reuters on Tuesday reported that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers” and that officials hope to publish…

Nvidia is looking to speed access to AI storage and memory systems by open-sourcing its cuFile APIs and software stack. It’s also promoting a new 40-vendor initiative that aims to standardize GPU-driven storage advancements. At this week’s Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference , Nvidia said it would open-source its cuFile APIs and the vertical storage software stack underneath them, which…

The growth of AI across all sectors has led to an increased demand to connect even more things. That’s an area where LoRaWAN, the low-power networking protocol, is making significant inroads as all manner of industries are trying to bridge the gap between the physical world and the digital one. LoRaWAN now connects more than 125 million devices worldwide and is increasingly adding deployments tha…

In mid-July, New York became the first state to impose a state-wide moratorium on new data center construction. “Data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers,” wrote Governor Kathy Hochul in her executive order. The moratorium is planned to last for a year, and the state will use the time to research the impact o…

AI is profoundly changing enterprise and service provider networks, and operators must evolve to support AI workloads, according to a Cisco executive who testified last week at a US Senate subcommitee meeting. Bob Everson , chief architect of provider mobility with Cisco, spoke before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media, which falls under the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Scienc…

Over the past two decades, Nvidia has greatly expanded beyond its gaming GPU roots into HPC and AI, the CPU business, a dominant position in networking, and as a world class leader in AI software. Its latest target for expansion is to become a financial guarantor for the next wave of AI infrastructure in a move that would position the company is not only the supplier of the AI equipment but also …