A century ago, the evolution of the car hit a bump in the road. Highways at the time couldn’t support high-speed motoring. Today, AI is facing a similar challenge. Find out how BT and Google Cloud are collaborating to release the brakes on customers’ AI plans.

When I talk to BT’s multinational customers, they say it’s the end of the road for legacy networks. Like motorists 100 years ago, they realise that slow is the new down.

The invention of the automobile was transformational. Mass-produced, affordable cars expanded people’s horizons and created new opportunities for business. As Carl Benz’s “Motorwagen” evolved into modern-day cars, performance outstripped the ability of roads to carry them. For the car to reach its full potential, new infrastructure was needed. Autobahns, interstate highways and motorways became the transportation backbone of the modern world.

A similar story is being written today, but instead of physical items like you and me, it’s about transporting AI workloads in the digital world — from locations such as Google Cloud data-centres all the way to users and devices, wherever they may be.

A rear-view mirror

Most businesses still use networks built for a previous generation of IT, where users sat in offices and accessed apps and data stored in their own data-centre. Traffic was predictable and connectivity specified at the start of a fixed-term contract. Few changes were needed, and those that were took days or weeks to make.

AI is changing that. AI traffic is unpredictable. For example, training large language models (LLMs) can cause surges in bandwidth demand, congesting inflexible networks. This impacts not just AI performance, but that of other apps too. Moreover, AI workloads can be split between many users in different places. The app itself may be hosted across multiple clouds.

AI-ready performance

At BT, we pride ourselves on delivering rock-solid foundations for our customers’ digital business. We understand AI demands and are building a brand-new network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform designed specifically to meet its needs.

Called Global Fabric, it offers multinational customers connectivity on demand to a full choice of third-party cloud, AI and SaaS providers. They can choose routes, types of connectivity (eg Internet, Ethernet, IP-VPN), scale, locations and services to connect to, all in an instant with the flexibility to make changes at any time. With Global Fabric, we want AI to run best on BT wherever customers are, wherever the data is. That’s a huge ambition and demands extraordinary scale. No single network provider can do this on their own.

That’s why we’re deepening our partnership with Google Cloud. We’re combining the power of Global Fabric with Cloud WAN, Google Cloud’s fully managed, reliable and secure enterprise WAN backbone that leverages the planet-scale Google network to optimise AI performance and cost.

Together, Global Fabric and Google’s Cloud WAN deliver:

• An extensive network
• A network engineered for speed
• One of the most resilient networks
• And the best outcomes for our customers.

To do this, we’re pre-integrating Cloud WAN’s low-latency subsea optical links into Global Fabric. Customers will have a wide selection of high-speed, reliable routes for their digital workloads, all available at the click of a button on Global Fabric’s web portal. They’ll be able to create fully modern, high-performance, secure and resilient flexible networks for their business — meaning they can put their foot to the floor with their AI plans.

Our partnership will also see BT offering customers Google Cloud Partner Interconnect via Global Fabric in 50 of the world’s top cloud locations, growing to 70 by 2026. This will give customers instant connectivity into Google Cloud, with a 99.99 per cent reliability service level agreement (SLA) backed by BT and Google Cloud.

BT will continue to deepen its collaboration with Google Cloud to ensure reliable, direct, and the fastest low-latency access to Google and Google Cloud services across BT’s network.

For customers on their AI journey, our partnership with Google Cloud offers a high-speed route to success. Traffic restrictions are being lifted. A brand new hyperscale highway awaits.

– By Bas Burger, CEO, International, BT