Distributed AI and Networking Innovations: We enjoyed interviewing Shekar Ayyar during the latest Silicon Valley Tech Talks episode. Shekar is the Chief Executive Officer of Arrcus, a Silicon Valley-based software company that primarily provides scalable and high-performance network infrastructure solutions for data centers, service providers, and edge/cloud networks.

Here are the brief highlights of our chat with Shekar:

(1) Shekar outlined how the explosion of cloud computing and AI has fundamentally changed networking demands. Traditional networking, built on point-to-point internet infrastructure, can no longer support modern applications’ scale and distributed nature. Arcus is building a high-performance, software-defined networking fabric from the ground up to serve diverse clients—cloud providers, telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises—through disaggregated, hardware-agnostic routing and switching.

(2) The rising importance of AI inference—where models are deployed and decisions are made at the edge—further underscores the need for efficient, distributed infrastructure.

(3) Despite some of the known issues related to its application in networking, Shekar also explained how AI can improve networking through predictive maintenance, fault detection, and dynamic routing. Agentic AI, in particular, can aid in automating network creation and management.

(4) Regarding 5G and beyond, networking innovations related to network slicing and quality of service can improve service granularity and integrate fixed wireless, cloud, and enterprise infrastructure. This positions service providers to deliver more innovative services and command premium pricing in the 5G-to-6G transition.

(5) Arcus is partnering with NVIDIA to develop AI-optimized networking infrastructure, like the TGAX switch and ARC-OS on Nvidia’s Bluefield DPU. This offloads certain network functions from GPUs, improving efficiency, reducing cost, and freeing up compute power for large-scale AI workloads—delivering up to 30–40% performance and resource utilization improvements.