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Agile AI Architectures: The Fungible Data Center for the AI Era#

OCP Global Summit 2025 digest Program Wildcard pick 13–16 October 2025

Abstract

Speakers: Partha Ranganathan (Google)

  • Why: The counterpoint keynote to every fixed-architecture session above: the argument that infrastructure — networks included — must become modular, fungible, and reconfigurable because AI's growth and volatility outpaces any single design. Worth an hour as a framing check on all the fabric decisions elsewhere in the program.
  • What: The case for fungible datacenter architectures: modular, interoperable, standards-based designs across the systems stack to deliver improvements in compute efficiency, reliability, and sustainability as AI demand grows and shifts. (from abstract only)
  • How: Architecture-research framing (Ranganathan leads systems research at Google) — modular cross-stack design plus industry-wide standardization as the mechanism; a keynote, so expect thesis and direction, not mechanisms.
  • Where applicable: Cross-industry framing rather than a deployable design; useful as strategic context for topology and platform bets with multi-year horizons.