Networking 2026

August 25, 2026
Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA

In 2026, @Scale: Networking will continue to focus on the evolution of AI Networking. To address the growing complexity of network operations, we will examine a full-stack perspective towards debugging, encompassing the communications layer through to the hardware. By adopting a holistic approach across both our front-end and back-end networks we can identify and mitigate potential bottlenecks, ensuring optimal network performance. You will also hear from industry experts and leading researchers who are at the forefront of building large scale networks. Attendees will benefit from the opportunity to learn about diverse approaches to solve common challenges and explore potential collaborations.

AGENDA SPEAKERS

EVENT AGENDA

Event times below are displayed in PT.

August 25

08:30 AM - 09:45 AM
Registration
08:30 AM - 09:45 AM
Breakfast, Raffle Submissions, and Networking

General Session (Mission City Ballroom)

09:45 AM - 09:50 AM
Event Welcome
Speaker Vignesh Vijayanath,Meta
09:50 AM - 10:10 AM
Keynote from Meta
Speaker Omar Baldonado,Meta

Track 1 (Mission City Ballroom)

Track 2 (Exhibit Hall A)

10:20 AM - 10:40 AM
Co-Designing Communication for AI Accelerators

This presentation details how Meta is addressing the massive compute and data demands of modern generative AI workloads by co-designing hardware, software, and models. The talk highlights the communications architecture of MTIA 300, Meta's custom-designed AI training and inference accelerator featuring dedicated message engines to efficiently offload communication workloads. By decoupling communication from the primary compute grid, the system minimizes resource contention and substantially drives up both compute and network efficiency. Additionally, the speakers explore how "network fungibility" allows the same network interface cards (NICs) to flexibly adapt to both scale-up and scale-out configurations depending on production needs. Ultimately, the presentation demonstrates how a tight co-design loop across infrastructure layers provides a scalable, future-ready roadmap for Meta’s rapidly evolving AI demand.

Speaker Rajeev Nair,Meta
Speaker Wes Bland,Meta
10:45 AM - 11:05 AM
Virgo: scale-out data center network for AI

To address the unique requirements of AI networking, we leverage our proven Jupiter network for north-south traffic and are introducing Virgo, a new fabric for east-west scale-out communication. Virgo is a dedicated accelerator-to-accelerator fabric optimized for massive horizontal scale. It is engineered for deterministic latency and maximum resilience to provide high goodput for the ML workload. Virgo will enable the new Google Cloud's A5x bare-metal instances, which run the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform. It is also a key building block for next-gen TPUs. This talk will discuss Virgo's design principles for resilience, observability, deployability, and multi-building scale.

Speaker Jeongkeun "JK" Lee,Google
11:10 AM - 11:30 AM
Physical Network Design at Scale

Physical network design—deciding how thousands of network devices and millions of fibers are distributed across data centers, racks, and failure domains—has traditionally been a manual, time-consuming process performed by design engineers. Yet we are seeing exponentially increasing demand to fulfill the capacity required by AI workloads. At Meta, we developed Loom, a system to automate and optimize the end-to-end physical network design pipeline. Loom orchestrates two core components: a device placement component (Planogram) which places network devices across the physical floorplan subject to dimensional and failure-domain constraints; and a fiber design component, which generates end-to-end fiber connectivity satisfying the variety of connectivity patterns driven by physical constraints. Together, these components accelerate end-to-end physical network design from months to hours, allowing us to produce more complex and efficient designs with fewer resources.

Speaker Richard Cziva,Meta
Speaker Brandon Premo,Meta
11:30 AM - 11:50 AM
Track 1 Live Q&A Session
Moderator Ying Zhang,Meta
11:50 AM - 01:10 PM
Lunch
10:20 AM - 10:40 AM
MetaRoCE: Meta’s Custom RDMA Transport

At Meta's scale — clusters growing to over a million accelerators across regions — the network is in the critical path of every AI training step, and traditional RDMA was never built for it.

MetaRoCE is Meta's clean-sheet RDMA transport: a multipath, out-of-order, receiver-driven protocol that treats Ethernet as inherently lossy and pushes all intelligence into the NIC. By shifting intelligence to the edge, the transport decouples from topology — enabling TCO-optimized multiplane FPF topologies with frictionless application adoption on commodity Ethernet.

This talk covers MetaRoCE's core mechanisms and Meta's commitment to open standards, including a companion conformance suite developed with Keysight that validates implementations from software reference through hardware emulation to production silicon.

Meta is opening MetaRoCE to the industry and inviting broader collaboration to establish it as the ubiquitous RDMA transport for AI-scale networks.

Speaker Arvind Srinivasan,Meta
Speaker Kingshuk Mandal,Keysight Technologies
10:45 AM - 11:05 AM
Talk from OpenAI
Speaker Jitendra Padhye,OpenAI
11:10 AM - 11:30 AM
MetaRoCE: From Spec to NIC to Open Source

As AI and distributed workloads push datacenter fabrics to their limits, Meta's answer is MetaRoCE — a multipath, out-of-order, receiver-driven protocol that treats Ethernet as inherently lossy and pushes all intelligence into the NIC. This talk traces MetaRoCE's journey from specification to silicon, showcasing its implementation on AMD Programmable NICs via reference software implementation and demonstrating how the architecture elegantly scales out within a cluster and scales across fabrics to meet diverse deployment needs. We present real-world performance results spanning multiplane FPF topologies, tail-latency optimization, and long-distance RDMA — proving MetaRoce approach solves AI data center requirements. Finally, we present a first look at Meta's upcoming open-source release of the MetaRoCE specification, reference implementation, and compliance suites at OCP — inviting the industry to build, extend, and innovate on MetaRoCE.

Speaker Sandeep Nagaraja,Meta
Speaker Balakrishnan Raman,AMD
11:30 AM - 11:50 AM
Track 2 Live Q&A Session
Moderator James Zeng,Meta
11:50 AM - 01:10 PM
Lunch

General Session (Mission City Ballroom)

01:10 PM - 01:40 PM
Live Panel: Scale-Out Networking for AI Supercomputers

Live Panel with Coreweave, Meta, OpenAI, Oracle
Moderated by Rajiv Krishnamurthy

Training frontier AI models requires connecting tens of thousands of accelerators into a single, tightly coupled fabric — pushing scale-out network design into uncharted territory. This panel brings together engineers building some of the world's largest AI training networks to discuss the architectures, transport protocols, and operational lessons behind today's supercomputer-scale fabrics. Topics will include topology choices, congestion control at extreme scale, and the co-design between network infrastructure and distributed training frameworks. Expect a practitioner-level conversation on what it takes to keep massive AI clusters connected, fast, and reliable.

Moderator Rajiv Krishnamurthy,Meta

Track 1 (Mission City Ballroom)

Track 2 (Exhibit Hall A)

01:50 PM - 02:15 PM
Fiber Networks Innovations for AI at Scale

Prometheus introduced significant complexity for connectivity. We were faced with significantly higher fiber count requirements, highly dynamic demand location, and compressed timelines for delivery. Tune in to find out the innovations required to meet the demand across multiple data centers in the cluster.

Speaker Fabrice Ouandji,Meta
Speaker Sebastian Gault,Meta
02:20 PM - 02:45 PM
Talk from Nebius
Speaker Alexey Gorovoy,Nebius
02:45 PM - 03:00 PM
Break
01:50 PM - 02:15 PM
To Be Announced
02:20 PM - 02:45 PM
Anatomy of @scale Machine Learning Network Operations

As machine learning continues to grow in scale, so too do the challenges of operating these mission critical networks. Join me in a journey through the operational challenges, and nuances found in Machine Learning and AI at scale around Infrastructure Networks.

Speaker Jim Julson,Coreweave
02:45 PM - 03:00 PM
Break

General Session (Mission City Ballroom)

03:00 PM - 03:10 PM
Lightning Talks Introduction - AI for NI
Speaker Mohab Gawish,Meta
03:10 PM - 03:20 PM
Lightning Talk - The Plan That Learns

Network capacity planning is high-stakes and unforgiving: capacity is committed years ahead, every long-range forecast is guaranteed to be wrong, and the costliest surprises are correlated demand shocks that defeat traditional risk-pooling. Much of the pipeline is already automated — but the decisions that take real judgment have stayed manual, and those are the ones that decide whether a wrong forecast corners you. This talk is about applying AI to exactly those decisions — not to chase a more accurate forecast, but to position capacity so it keeps our options open no matter how demand breaks. We show how agents are beginning to crack the three that matter most: acting inside narrow buy windows (triaging signals continuously to surface the handful of truly novel sites, weeks down to minutes), trusting data across systems that disagree on even basic definitions (a measure-enrich-regrade loop), and choosing among coupled, timing-sensitive levers (a ranked, costed menu of moves with the reasoning attached). The real frontier is a plan that learns — agents that remember every decision and how it turned out, so human judgment compounds over time instead of resetting with each planner.

Speaker Ben Vallis,Meta
03:20 PM - 03:30 PM
Lightning Talk - 10x Network Design Engineer

Designing a datacenter network is where a capacity requirement becomes a blueprint: assigning device roles, wiring the interconnect, laying out addressing and failure domains, and producing the bill of materials — all while keeping the design constrained, connected, and correct. It is some of the most judgment-heavy work in network engineering, and until recently it resisted automation. This talk walks through how that is starting to change. Today, agents assist with discrete steps — sizing a fabric, proposing a topology, analyzing a change — but the trajectory points toward a single agent that can own the design end-to-end. Drawing on real waypoints from Meta's fabrics, Maaz shows what already works, where the hard problems remain (validation, above all), and how the engineer's role shifts from author to approver. The through-line: humans still make the call — they just no longer have to draw every line.

Speaker Maaz Mohiuddin,Meta
03:30 PM - 03:40 PM
Lightning Talk - AI-Native Network Capacity Management

The network capacity lifecycle, from demand signal to production operations, is a pipeline. Each stage consumes the output of the previous one, and failures compound downstream. A bad forecast leads to a bad design; a bad design leads to a painful deployment; a painful deployment leads to operational fragility.

The AI-native effort asks: what if every stage of this pipeline had an AI agent as a first-class participant? An AI agent can act as a force multiplier, automating the mechanical, surfacing the non-obvious, and closing feedback loops that today take weeks or months.

Speaker Mohab Gawish,Meta
03:40 PM - 03:50 PM
Lightning Talk - AI4NI @Runtime

When operating a large-scale production network serving billions of users, we face daily challenges in running network infrastructure reliably and efficiently. AI4NI @Runtime tackles these challenges across three dimensions: reliability, performance, and efficiency. At Meta, we’ve begun developing AI agents in each area and have seen promising early results. In this talk, we’ll share our solution architecture, example agentic systems, and initial findings from production trials, along with the key technical challenges and our planned directions to address them.

Speaker YuLing Chen,Meta
03:55 PM - 04:20 PM
Live Panel: Building at the Roofline — Planning and Delivering Gigawatt-Scale AI Infrastructure

Live Panel with Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle
Moderated by Omar Baldonado

Today's largest AI fleets span multiple generations of technology — from power and buildings to fiber and accelerators — and must be delivered at a pace that pushes the entire supply ecosystem to its limits. This panel brings together leaders from hyperscaler infrastructure planning and technical sourcing organizations to discuss how they navigate this complexity. The conversation will explore long-range fleet strategy, multi-vendor orchestration, and the engineering realities of operating at the roofline of industry capacity. Expect a candid discussion on what it takes to plan and deliver AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale.

Moderator Omar Baldonado,Meta
04:20 PM - 04:25 PM
Closing Remarks
04:25 PM - 06:00 PM
Happy Hour

SPEAKERS AND MODERATORS

Vignesh Vijayanath is a Technical Program Management leader at Meta, where he specializes in... read more

Vignesh Vijayanath

Meta

Omar Baldonado leads the groups that develop/operate Meta's global data center networks. These networks... read more

Omar Baldonado

Meta

Rajeev Nair is an engineering leader with deep expertise in cloud host networking, hardware-software... read more

Rajeev Nair

Meta

Wes is a research scientist at Meta working on network communication capabilities for AI... read more

Wes Bland

Meta

JK is a Tech Lead of Virgo, a new scale-out network for GPUs/TPUs in... read more

Jeongkeun "JK" Lee

Google

Richard Cziva is a Network Modeling and Optimization Engineer at Meta, where he works... read more

Richard Cziva

Meta

Brandon Premo has been a Network Engineer at Meta for over 9 years. His... read more

Brandon Premo

Meta

Ying Zhang is a Software Engineering Manager at Meta, where she leads the core... read more

Ying Zhang

Meta

Arvind Srinivasan is an architect in the Network Infrastructure Group at Meta, bringing nearly... read more

Arvind Srinivasan

Meta

Kingshuk Mandal is a seasoned networking technologist at Keysight Technologies with over three decades... read more

Kingshuk Mandal

Keysight Technologies

Jitendra Padhye

OpenAI

Member of the Host Networking Team in DCN org, supporting BE-NIC development. I have... read more

Sandeep Nagaraja

Meta

Balakrishnan Raman is a Senior Fellow at AMD, working on AI transport technologies, including... read more

Balakrishnan Raman

AMD

James Zeng currently leads AI Networking Software team at Meta. Since joining Meta in... read more

James Zeng

Meta

Rajiv Krishnamurthy is a Software Engineering Director in the Network Infrastructure group at Meta.... read more

Rajiv Krishnamurthy

Meta

Fabrice is a Partner Manager within the Network Investments team at Meta. In his... read more

Fabrice Ouandji

Meta

Sebastian is a Network Implementation Engineer within the Network Investments Team, focused on outside... read more

Sebastian Gault

Meta

I am a Network Engineer with over 15 years of experience across network operations,... read more

Alexey Gorovoy

Nebius

Tackling big scale, and big problems, for mission critical Networks. read more

Jim Julson

Coreweave

Mohab is a senior network engineer specializing in data center network architecture, high-performance computing,... read more

Mohab Gawish

Meta

I lead teams focused on capacity and performance for Meta's Edge Network. My teams'... read more

Ben Vallis

Meta

Maaz Mohiuddin is a Production Network Engineer at Meta, where he designs and sizes... read more

Maaz Mohiuddin

Meta

I’m a Production Engineer on Meta’s Network Infrastructure team. My primary areas of focus... read more

YuLing Chen

Meta
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