Networking

Oxford-based Salience Labs has closed an oversubscribed $125 million Series B funding round to scale its photonic networking chips for AI data center infrastructure. The round was led by Bullhound Capital, whose principal Callum Stewart is joining the company's board. New and returning backers include AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank, along with existing shareholders Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

Enterprise VPN appliances are supposed to guard the edge of the network. This week, one of the most widely used of them became the way in.

NVIDIA and Cisco are trying to solve one of the least glamorous but most binding limits in AI data centers: the front panel of the switch. At the Open Compute Project Global Summit in Santa Clara on October 12, the two companies announced plans for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable, or USFP, a new optical module designed for 400 gigabits per second per lane.

Cisco published security advisory cisco-sa-ngoam-rce-LWKQ4BU on October 7, 2026, covering three critical vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-76485, CVE-2026-76486, and CVE-2026-76501 — in the Next Generation Operation, Administration, and Maintenance (NGOAM) feature of NX-OS software on Nexus 3000 and standalone-mode 9000 Series switches. Each scores CVSS 9.8: an unauthenticated remote attacker can send crafted packets to an IP interface and execute code with root privileges, or crash processes and force device reloads in a denial-of-service attack.

One of the more consequential shifts in developer infrastructure this week arrived on Friday: the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare. The move, announced October 9 on both companies' blogs, folds the startup behind the Deno JavaScript and TypeScript runtime into Cloudflare's Workers and Durable Objects organization. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Enterprise IT has a new supply-chain reality to reckon with. At its recent Apsara Conference, Alibaba Cloud laid out the most complete picture yet of a self-developed AI compute stack that runs from silicon to full rack-scale clusters — and it is considerably deeper than most Western observers assumed.

Cisco unveiled a new generation of agentic collaboration capabilities on October 7, repositioning Webex around AI agents that work alongside people instead of waiting for prompts. The centerpiece is Claude in Webex, built with Claude Managed Agents, which lets teams analyze data, generate content, and execute multi-step work using shared enterprise context without leaving the collaboration app.

The network is becoming the computer — or at least the backplane. On October 7, Arista Networks announced an open Ethernet rack-scale portfolio designed to power high-density scale-up and scale-out AI infrastructure, extending Ethernet into territory long held by proprietary interconnects.