Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Zoran. Today we're talking about trends in

data centers focusing on hyperscalers. These are some of the world's most

well-known companies running massive data centers with hundreds of thousands of

servers.

We're talking about companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Alibaba, and

Tencent.

Innovation in the data center traditionally has been constrained by the model in which suppliers provided fixed function networking ships that limit how much the biggest data center operators can differentiate.

In recent years, though, programmable chips have allowed these companies to customize and increase performance,

latency, and reliability for the incredible amounts of data center traffic they manage.

This trend also allows the hyperscalers to innovate throughout the pipeline from operating system to networking interface to user application.

To talk about the trends and data centers, we talked this summer to two experts.

Martine Cassato is an A16Z general partner focused on enterprise investing. Before that he was a pioneer in the software defined networking movement and the co-founder of Nysera which was acquired by VMware.

He's joined by Nick McKeehan, a Stanford professor of computer science who has founded multiple companies and was Martin's co-founder at Nysera and has worked with hyperscalers to innovate within their data centers.

After this podcast was recorded, Nick was appointed senior vice president and general manager of a new Intel organization, the network and edge group.

We start with Nick explaining the sheer scale of traffic inside data centers and how that is changing the industry.

If you were to cut a line vertically through the United States

and then look at all of the public internet traffic that was passing from

left to right and right to left.

We call this the bisection bandwidth of the internet.

It's essentially how much capacity the internet has crossing the United States.

That is less than the amount of traffic going between a couple of hundred servers inside one data center.

It's just being inverted, the whole model of how communication takes place has really become dominated by the insides of data centers of all the communication that's taking place for compute and nowadays machine learning training and

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