Why AI Inference Is Becoming a Networking Issue
Cisco, Thursday, July 23rd, 2026
Cisco argues AI inference is now a networking problem as network latency becomes the key bottleneck.
Cisco argues that AI inference has become fundamentally a networking problem rather than purely a compute issue.
As inference hardware improves and token latency drops, network latency emerges as the critical bottleneck, especially for agentic AI applications with many sequential interactions.
The article notes prompts traverse two interconnected fabrics (the request network and the GPU fabric) and that positioning models closer to users and data is essential. Agentic AI adoption is expected to increase enterprise traffic ninefold by 2035.