For decades, network architects designed data center networks primarily around application and storage traffic. Whether supporting enterprise applications, web services, virtualization platforms, or cloud-native workloads, the network was the transport mechanism connecting users, applications, and data.

Traffic patterns were characterized by north-south communication flows, predictable east-west application exchanges, and a relatively loose coupling between compute and network performance. High-performance computing environments differed somewhat by emphasizing ultra-high bandwidth, low latency, and efficient inter-node communication for distributed workloads. However, modern AI infrastructure introduces a fundamentally different model.