This webinar will explore the latest trends in AI infrastructure and their impact on optical interconnects. Join us to understand the critical infrastructure strategies powering AI at scale.
December 09, 2025
4:00 PM UTC
1 hour
Sponsored by
December 9th, 2025
11:00 AM ET / 10:00 AM CT / 8:00 AM PT / 3:00 PM GM
As AI workloads grow exponentially, understanding how to architect the networking infrastructure at scale is critical for delivering performance, efficiency, and security. This webinar will explore the latest trends in AI infrastructure and their impact on optical interconnects, including:
Scale Up: Enhancing the capacity of individual systems by increasing compute power, memory, and storage within a single node to handle demanding AI training and inference tasks.
Scale Out: Expanding capacity horizontally by connecting multiple nodes into clusters, enabling distributed AI workloads and parallel processing.
Scale Across: Extending high-performance networking across multiple data center locations to support AI workloads.
Attendees will gain insights into:
The infrastructure demands driven by agentic AI and large language models (LLMs).
The role of data center interconnect in enabling high-speed, secure connectivity between AI clusters and data centers leveraging optical interconnects
Evolving standards and technologies that enable seamless interoperability and performance optimization across AI architectures.
Join us to understand the critical infrastructure strategies powering AI at scale.
Speakers
Tom Williams
VP of Marketing
Acacia
Tom Williams, VP of Technical Marketing, joined
Cisco via the Acacia acquisition. He leads marketing efforts for the Acacia
coherent optics team that was acquired by Cisco in March 2021. Tom has spent
over 20 years developing optical transmission equipment ranging from 10G to
1.2T. He participates in a variety of coherent standardization activities in
OIF, IEEE and Open ROADM and is co-chair of the OpenZR+ MSA. Tom spent nearly
15 years in various management roles at Optium, where he participated in the
company’s 2006 IPO and 2008 acquisition by Finisar. Tom joined Acacia in 2015,
where his role has included corporate and product marketing responsibility, as
well as contributing to product roadmap definitions.
Mark Nowell
Cisco Fellow
Cisco’s Optics and Optical Systems Group
Mark
Nowell is a Cisco Fellow in Cisco’s Optics and Optical Systems Group. His focus
is on next generation interconnect technology innovation to meet Cisco's needs.
Mark is also active within industry standards and forums and has chaired
multiple IEEE 802.3 Ethernet projects and many industry alliances and
Consortium (MSAs). He is currently vice-chair of IEEE 802.3dj (800 GbE &
1.6 TbE) and chairs/co-chairs groups focusing on next generation optical module
form factors (QSFP-DD, OSFP) or optical interfaces (100G Lambda MSA, LPO MSA).
He is also representing Cisco in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) and Ultra
Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink) focusing on Ethernet adoption for
AI/ML/HPC use cases.
