The Internet's New Factories
AI factories create several traffic systems at once, and power is shaping where they can be built. This article asks what operators can see, what stays private, and who decides how these systems are connected.
Published
AI factories create several traffic systems at once, and power is shaping where they can be built. This article asks what operators can see, what stays private, and who decides how these systems are connected.
In The Internet’s New Builders I described how content and cloud platforms moved from buying capacity to building cables and private backbones. The Internet’s New Edge Builders followed many of the same companies closer to users. AI brings the same shift into compute itself. An AI factory runs accelerators, storage, data pipelines and several separate networks as one system, and when compute is spread across halls, campuses and regions, the links between them become part of the machine. For many operators, AI will show up first as a request for private fiber, dedicated wavelengths and data-center interconnection, or as crawler and agent load on their origins, long before it shows up as a jump in public transit.
Continue at source: The Internet’s New Factories on RIPE Labs.
Originally published on RIPE Labs, 6 November 2026.