Because AI Also Needs a Network (and a Fast One!)
It’s late 2025, and if you thought your home Wi-Fi was struggling with 4K streaming, imagine what an AI supercomputer feels like. 🤯 Microsoft just dropped their “Year in Review” for Azure Networking, and the numbers are honestly mind-boggling. We aren’t just talking about connecting servers anymore; we are talking about the “circulatory system” of the AI cloud.
Here is the “Too Long; Didn’t Read” (and the “Why Should I Care?”) breakdown of what’s happening.
The “Need for Speed” checklist 🏎️
If you are planning to run the next Skynet (or just a really big SQL server), here is what Microsoft has been cooking up:
1. The “Fairwater” Scale (800 Gbps!)
Microsoft built a new AI datacenter in Wisconsin called “Fairwater.” It’s basically a 315-acre computer. To make it work, they had to link GPUs at 800 Gbps.
- Fun fact: That is 10x the performance of standard high-performance networks. It’s not just fast; it’s “ludicrous speed.”
2. ExpressRoute gets an Upgrade (400 Gbps)
For us mere mortals connecting our on-prem datacenters to Azure, 400 Gbps ExpressRoute Direct ports are coming in 2026.
- Why it matters: If you have massive datasets (like for training AI models locally and pushing them to the cloud), the network pipe is no longer the bottleneck.
3. VPN Gateway isn’t dead yet
They bumped the VPN Gateway throughput to 20 Gbps aggregate (and 5 Gbps per tunnel).
- Step: If you have branch offices, check your gateways. You might be able to squeeze way more juice out of them now without upgrading hardware.
Smarter, Not Just Harder 🧠
It’s not all about raw bandwidth. They made the management plane smarter too.
- Virtual WAN Force Tunneling: Finally, a simpler way to force all that branch traffic back to your central firewall hub for inspection. No more creative routing tables that break every Tuesday.
- Route Server Scale: Now supports up to 500 connections. If you are running SD-WAN or custom NVAs, this is huge. It effectively means your “hub and spoke” topology can be massive.
- Resilience Insights: A new tool that gives you a “score” on how likely your ExpressRoute is to survive a fiber cut. It even has a failover simulation tool.
- Step: Go run this tool. Seriously. Do it before your boss asks why the network is down.
My Take 💭
Honestly, the most interesting part for me isn’t the raw speed (though 800 Gbps is cool), but the “Resilience by Default” mindset. The fact that we now have tools to simulate a fiber cut on an ExpressRoute circuit is fantastic. We used to have to wait for a backhoe to actually cut the line to test our failover! 🚜
Also, the integration of AI into troubleshooting (Azure Copilot for networking) is the real game-changer for operations. Instead of digging through 500 lines of logs to find out why a packet dropped, simply asking “Why can’t App A talk to DB B?” and getting an answer is… well, it allows us network engineers to sleep a little more.
The network is becoming invisible again, which is exactly how it should be. Fast, resilient, and self-healing.
Now, if only I could get 800 Gbps to my house… 🤔