March 16, 2026

Welcome back. NVIDIA’s annual GTC conference is kicking off, Cisco is bringing AI closer to the edge, and a major merger is unfolding in the fiber market. As always, thank you for reading - and hit us up with any feedback.

Today’s edition:

Let’s dive in.

NVIDIA's GTC opened with Jensen Huang projecting $1 trillion in purchase orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems through 2027, doubling last year's $500B estimate, as agentic AI drives inference demand faster than the company previously modeled.

HPE told customers that server and storage prices quoted at order time may not hold by the time equipment ships, as DRAM now accounts for more than half the cost of a standard server and memory prices are expected to stay elevated into 2027. Networking hardware, which carries far less memory in its bill of materials, is largely insulated from the repricing risk.

Cisco expanded its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to support edge deployments, adding RTX PRO Blackwell GPU support across the Cisco UCS and Unified Edge portfolios so enterprises can run inference at local sites without data center-scale hardware footprint.

Google Fiber is merging with Astound Broadband under a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak, with Alphabet staying on as a minority shareholder. The combined entity gets GFiber's high-growth metro fiber networks and Astound's established footprint and operational scale, creating one of the larger independent fiber providers in the US.

Between the lines: This is Google acknowledging, quietly but clearly, that running a fiber ISP is not a core business. GFiber has spent over a decade as a proof of concept that better internet is possible, and it has genuinely moved the market by pressuring incumbents to upgrade their own networks. Handing majority ownership to Stonepeak gives GFiber access to infrastructure capital without Alphabet carrying the buildout cost on its balance sheet. For Astound, it's a brand upgrade and a technology infusion. For the fiber market broadly, it signals that independent fiber at national scale is increasingly a private infrastructure play, not a tech company experiment.

The broader read: Watch how this affects competitive dynamics in markets where GFiber and Astound overlap with Comcast, AT&T, and Frontier. A better-capitalized independent with GFiber's brand and Astound's reach is a more credible long-term competitor than either was separately.

Read the announcement today

The Ethernet switch market just posted its biggest quarter on record, and AI infrastructure is almost entirely responsible. Data center switch revenue hit $9.9 billion in Q4 2025, up 63% year-over-year, with 800G and 200/400G ports driving the bulk of the volume. Full-year data center revenue came in at $32.5 billion.

Why this matters now: Cisco and Arista captured significant share of that growth, but the headline is NVIDIA, whose Ethernet switch revenue nearly tripled as hyperscalers standardized on high-performance networking for AI back-end fabrics. The campus and branch market grew too, just not at anywhere near the same pace, which tells you where the investment cycle is concentrated right now.

The open question: The data center refresh wave is real, but it is running ahead of enterprise adoption. Organizations outside the hyperscaler tier are still figuring out what their AI networking requirements actually look like. When that demand crystallizes, the campus and branch numbers will catch up. Learn more about this here.

Learn more about this here.

💰 News that a Korean smelter is in talks with US firms to extract rare earths viewed as ‘a structural shift’ in the infrastructure economy. (Network World)

💪 Extreme Networks CFO Kevin Rhodes touted the vendor’s ability to attract key executives and sales members from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (SDxCentral)

🖥️ Qualcomm to bolster IoT capabilities with Edge Impulse acquisition (Qualcomm)

Catch up