With artificial intelligence requiring more complexity at every level, Dell Technologies Inc. looks to support telephone companies in taking advantage of the newest AI innovations.

“AI is not a server and a network; it’s a full system,” said Ihab Tarazi (pictured), senior vice president and chief technology officer of the Infrastructure Solutions Group Core at Dell. “The GPU is very highly dependent on the network … so [that] has become a very big focus of attention to get the maximum performance and throughput inside the system.”

Tarazi spoke with theCUBE Research analysts Dave Vellante, John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at MWC Barcelona, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the impact of machine learning on telco systems and the future of networking technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Designing a system that supports AI

Implementing AI alongside multicloud is the next step in advancing telco infrastructure, according to Tarazi. In the past few years, Dell has helped telcos to deploy cloud capabilities horizontally.

“We’ve solved multicloud for [telcos] by having common storage and being able to pick the choice of software for the different clouds on different compute. The next wave now is driven by AI,” Tarazi said. “We’re at the phase of how does AI and multicloud work together.”

Because AI has to be customized for each deployment, the network that supports it is crucial. Dell can tell customers whether InfiniBand, with its low latency, or Ethernet, with its low cost and greater distribution, is the better option based on the application, according to Tarazi.

“We have passed the days where you make a network decision independently of compute,” he said. “If the network is constraining the ability to move data into memory, it impacts the performance significantly. That’s why networking has to be tuned with AI.”

Telcos also have the potential to support the AI revolution in tech, Tarazi added.

“Telcos have a tremendous amount of data,” he said. “All that can become gen AI models.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of MWC Barcelona: 

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the MWC Barcelona event. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE