NFD40: Scale-Across, Vendor Gravity, and the Elephant out of the Room

At NFD40, Nokia, Cisco, and Arista revealed that AI networking is rapidly evolving beyond traditional scale-out architectures into a new era of “scale-across” infrastructure spanning multiple data centers. Beneath the vendor positioning and optics discussions was a larger reality: AI networking is becoming an operational discipline where network performance directly impacts GPU utilization, job completion time, and business outcomes.