Chalking up the latest in a series of partnerships that it has signed in its flagship event, Google Cloud has revealed it’s working with BT to integrate services to provide what they claim will be one of the fastest and most resilient global networks for businesses building artificial intelligence (AI)-powered services, giving them the performance, scale and reliability they need to succeed in the AI era.
Explaining the rationale for the move, BT drew a comparison between the modern business environment for networking and AI, and the evolution of the car, which it said, literally, hit a bump in the road a century ago, as highways at the time couldn’t support high-speed motoring. Right now, BT suggested, AI was facing a similar challenge, and to that end, it was collaborating with Google Cloud to “release the brakes” on customers’ AI plans.
“When I talk to BT’s multinational customers, they say it’s the end of the road for legacy networks,” said Bas Burger, international CEO at BT, speaking at the Google Cloud Next 25 event. “Like motorists 100 years ago, they realise that slow is the new down. The invention of the automobile was transformational.
“As Carl Benz’s ‘Motorwagen’ evolved into modern-day cars, performance outstripped the ability of roads to carry them,” he said. “For the car to reach its full potential, new infrastructure was needed. Autobahns, interstate highways and motorways became the transportation backbone of the modern world.
“A similar story is being written today, but instead of physical items like you and me, it’s about transporting AI workloads in the digital world – from locations such as Google Cloud datacentres all the way to users and devices, wherever they may be.”
Putting this into the perspective of business infrastructures, Burger argued that businesses still use networks built for a previous generation of IT, where users sat in offices and accessed apps and data stored in their own datacentre. Traffic was predictable and connectivity specified at the start of a fixed-term contract. Few changes were needed, and those that were took days or weeks to make.
Yet the key thing was that AI in networking was changing all of that, he stressed. “AI traffic is unpredictable,” said Burger. “For example, training large language models can cause surges in bandwidth demand, congesting inflexible networks. This impacts not just AI performance, but that of other apps, too. Moreover, AI workloads can be split between many users in different places. The app itself may be hosted across multiple clouds.”
In the extended partnership with Google Cloud, BT said it would be combining the capability of its Global Fabric platform with Cloud WAN, Google Cloud’s fully managed, enterprise WAN backbone that uses the whole Google network to optimise AI performance and cost.
Together, BT and Global Fabric and Google’s Cloud WAN were aiming to deliver an extensive network engineered for speed that would be resilient and deliver the best outcomes for customers. To do this, BT was pre-integrating Cloud WAN’s low-latency subsea optical links into Global Fabric so that customers would have a wide selection of routes for their digital workloads available on Global Fabric’s web portal.
The result, said Burger, would be customers creating fully modern, high-performance, secure and resilient flexible networks for their business, “meaning they can put their foot to the floor with their AI plans”.
