The Rise of DDoS Attacks and Nokia’s $4B AI Networking Bet | TSG Ep. 974

Hey everyone, those DDoSs just keep getting bigger. You are watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Happy Tuesday. It's gonna be a short week here on the Gang. It's the US holiday of Thanksgiving, so a lot of us might be heading out to visit family or heading home to have family visit us, but we probably, I think Wednesday will be, uh, our show and then we'll do one for Friday.

Um, but be that, whether you are taking off for the Thanksgiving holiday or not, we're glad you're watching and joining us today on Textron Gang. As we kick off our Tuesday coverage, let me introduce you to our fantastic gang that we have for today. We have, uh, our friend Steven FoST, also our friend jp.

They're all our friends. They're all gang members here, JP Morgenthal, hope Lynch and Y Ney, and give ney. I always mess up your last name, but it's Caram.

And then of course, the dean, Mike Vizard gang. Welcome. We've got a lot to go over today, so let's dive right into things.

You know, over the years, I, I don't know, maybe it's this, that spectator in me, I love to see how many, how big a DDoS attack can get, right? They've grown over the years because, you know, we have, we have organizations like Akamai and CloudFlare, these big CRNs that can diffuse these, you know, often terabits of, of, of, uh, of traffic that these DDoS storms create. But it looks like maybe we got all, we, we hit another new, I don't know if it's an all time high, but eugeni a major attack against Microsoft, uh, by a particular, you know, and, and these, it's botnets that really, you know, create these storms.

Evgeni, what can you tell us? Or Mike, do you wanna kick us off and we'll go to Yu Afghani? Yeah, Yeah, just the facts of the case are, um, at least Microsoft is reporting that, uh, I think more than 500,000, basically a half a million IP addresses were involved in this attack.

And these things have been steadily increasing all year long. I mean, it seems like there's now a leapfrog to kind of make the next biggest DDoS attack, and it seems to be happening at a rate of almost, you know, a new record every two to three months or so, Afghani, is that what we're seeing? But is all this eventually gonna build to the point where, well, maybe we will take down the internet?

I don't know, but what's your concern? There's a couple of things that's a very, very interesting, if it go 10, 15 years ago, we had this attacks there as well, but the difference that we used to implement a DDoS devices OnPrem, now it's not gonna be possible because the device OnPrem, it's still very, very related to the amount of traffic and the throughput of the internet you have. So you have to have a DDoS protection in the cloud, whereas the pipe of the provider will be much bigger than the pipe of the end user there.

So companies like Akamai, company like CloudFlare or Roger, and many others have five as well, have a cloud approach because we need a bigger pipe to be able to clean. And this become very interesting because we basically switch the way we protect users. Also with DDoS, we can do protections that on demand or protection all the time, depending on the cost as well.

And if you look on Microsoft, guess what, they're not using somebody else, at least as far as we know, they have their own protection, same as AWS, same with GCP. And it's a quite a big shift that some of the bigger companies decided to build their own protections like the clouds, the Azures, the, uh, the is instead of using somebody else. So this is definitely a shift because they need to provide and protect their customers and protect themself as well about the size and the scale.

We not always like to talk about ai, but the majority of the previous attacks, the bigger one that Mira botnets were not controlled by ai as far as we know they were controlled by humans. Right now, guess what, we may have a human that control some kind of an AI system that can now much better understand where to attack and how to shift that attack as well. And I think this, what we're gonna be seeing, we are gonna be seeing DDoS attacks that are managed by some kind of AI entity to make them smarter and able to shift them and maybe avoid the defenses of the, the target.

Interesting. You know, I I think one of the problem, not problems, it's not a problem, but I think one of the issues we have when we talk about how do we wanna defend against DDoS attacks is the fact of the matter is most DDoS attacks do not bring down sites anymore, right? It used to be, you know, Microsoft went dark for a couple hours or Google was brought down or what have you.

What happens is it is for most of us, DDoS has become a sort of minor annoyance. I mean, even here at Tech Trunk, right? We operate Security Boulevard, its security site, cyber site, and it's pretty well known.

It gets a lot of views. And so it's a frequent target of the bad guys because we're always publishing cyber stuff and you know, I'll get notified from our providers once every two, three weeks, Hey, we, we blocked a DDoS attack against the Boulevard today, right? And here's, here's the, you know, the metrics and so forth and where it came from and, and we, you know, and they put it into their normal, you know, uh, crime fighting kind of, uh, system there to try to figure out who did it and what's going on.

But, you know, and I may see the slights a little sluggish sometimes. Sometimes we don't even see the slight being sluggish. So it, it's kind of the, I I I analogize it to, you know, credit card fraud.

Most of us never are victims of credit card fraud in terms of it really cost us money. It's just a pain in the butt. We gotta file a claim with the credit card company or the bank, and they credit us back on our account, but it really doesn't cost us anything out of our pocket.

It's just an annoyance D Does. Interesting analogy, but it's, don't think about that. It's because we shift from on-prem protection.

You're no longer protecting your website here it down somebody else mm-hmm. Upstream. Yeah.

Right. And that's exactly it. We've, we've put the burden on someone else and let them worry about it.

And I think for a lot of us, that's what DDoS has become too. But I also, I also wonder in, in listening and thinking about this, um, yes, years ago you probably had an appliance on your network, but now it's up to the hyperscalers. But I think also part of it is them offloading risk, right?

So if I want to be safe, maybe I think, oh, I migrate to cloud instead of, you know, being part of the open and be centralized, uh, seemingly more fragile internet while the one that's controlled by the hyperscalers is more resilient. And also, um, there are a lot of companies that if they were still having appliances on-prem, it would be older legacy hardware, forget about regulation updates and all of those things, they probably would still be more vulnerable. Um, so I think A lot are just offloading the risk to The hyper.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. But let me, let me tell you a another side and a victim of this, right? Because how do you, how do you block DDoS attacks?

Basically, you, you filter out the ips that are attacking you, right? So we're getting, whether it's a ping or you know, whatever kind of traffic you're sending me, I say, okay, this ip, you know, Steven's IP is sending me a lot of garbage and I'm gonna filter it out. I'm just gonna filter out Steven's ip.

But Steven's not sending that on purpose. Steven's Steven's machine was zombie, right? And so, unbeknownst to Steven, his machine has been added to this botnet, and it's, and it's, you know, flooding my, my pipe.

And so I blocked Steven because he's flooding my pipe, you know? And Steven deserved. Now, Steven didn't deserve it.

What did he know? So, but, but, but now the problem is, is when do I turn Steven back on? And how does it impact Steven being blocked as a, uh, uh, one of the bots of this podcast?

That, that's that, yeah, that's a really interesting point. And I, you know, I I, I've thought about this before, and as you started speaking about it, I started to think about if you specify any time period, then the, the attackers are just gonna learn what that time period is and start re and turn back that node back on with it after that time period. So it's, now you need an a, a process to go through to get validated again, to get cleaned.

But I mean, sorry, it's like an STD, you should have to go to the doctor and get cleared before you get to Back on. I, I didn't have that on my bingo card, jp. I gotta be honest with you, Steven, was this, what are they say, Steven?

He, he was, in fact, I'm Sorry. It, it's a, it's, it's an appropriate level comparison because his machine was infected. I, I gotta say, I was enjoying this conversation until that jp um, you know, I, I swear it wasn't me.

Um, mm-hmm. But it, it's, you know, it is, it is funny 'cause the, um, the fact that most of these botnets are now using consumer IOT devices. You know, one of the things we pointed out in the article, for example, is that the, the rise of fiber to the home, uh, has made these all the more potent, because even a low powered, you know, device, an IOT camera, a thermostat, DVR, you know, router could, um, participate in a ddo s to a much greater extent than it could back in the old DSL days or something, you know?

But I agree that I, I've always felt like some things belong in the, in the network, and some things belong on-prem. You know, email is an application that belongs in the network. Uh, web servers belong in the network.

Why? Because, because they're accessed that way. Whereas, you know, other services belong on-prem.

DDoS mitigation strikes me as something that belongs in the network, and it, it, it should be something that companies like Akamai and CloudFlare and yes, Microsoft are working to mitigate rather than something that we individuals have to fight off because it's, it's really an internet problem. It's, uh, you know, like your, uh, uh, distasteful analogy, you know, there's a point at which a, um, a, a disease goes from a personal problem to a social problem. And I think DDoS is a social problem.

So we have to have companies like CloudFlare, for example, mitigating this. But that being said, think about last week's news about Cloudflare's outage. One of the reasons that it impacted so much of the internet, including all of my sites, including all of our sites, is because we rely on cloud or CloudFlare for DDoS protection.

And so by doing that, we're essentially putting all our eggs in this very one big, very capable basket. But that does open us up to other issues. And, and I could see a situation where one of these botnets successfully DDoS is, you know, a, a CloudFlare, Microsoft, or Google, and that would be really damaging.

So at what point though, am I, am Danny, work me through this, William, because it seems to me like I'm at half a million IP addresses. I'm probably this time next year gonna be seeing attacks involving a million IP addresses, and can I block a million IP addresses and figure out when they should be turned back on? And remember, there are multiple DDoS attacks out there.

So, um, at what point is this just gonna be become unmanageable? So somebody need to run and manage this vidos attack. I believe we already have some kind of an AI operated or half AI operated system that help me to run this attack to be more manageable on the bad guys.

This is gonna become the part on our side, on the good guy side as well, to use some kind of intelligence, artificial intelligence to help us understand what to run. Now, when we say block these ips, we are blocking them to access our sites. It doesn't mean we're blocking them to access other sites.

We're potentially making them this IP higher on a blacklist, and then maybe we're gonna block in from SAPs, or the reputation will go down because they have reputations list everywhere else as well. So there may be potentially gonna be blocked somewhere else. For example, if I'm a small business and from my ip, a DDoS launch, my IP reputation now goes higher or better, whatever you wanna say this now, potentially my emails may blocked or other connections from me maybe block somewhere else.

But to answer your question, we'll need a more sophisticated system to understand how this attack evolve and to block it as well. So we'll need to find a way. And majority of the vendors right now use AI in one way or another.

Not many people talk right now about AI-based DDoS protections. We have firewalls that are more AI aware right now, DDoS and ai, I didn't hear yet, but I'm sure all the providers have something that helps them evolve. That makes sense.

I, I know someone who you can call to help you. I, in, in, uh, doing a little research for this. So iru, who they say are responsible for it, one of the prime people, he's based in Brazil, not only is he part of the attackers, but he runs a DDoS mitigation service.

So, So he's playing both sides knows, He knows how he attacks and he knows how to defend. Well, those are the Best cars. Those are the best.

Isn't That like, just morally wrong? I'm sorry. Let's clarify.

He's setting the house on fire and putting out fire. So Yeah, it's good. But, but you know, it does bring up the issue though, that these botnet networks are oftentimes run by, um, pseudo, uh, state, you know, country, state actors, or at least supported by, uh, state actors.

And you know, now we, we have seen in the past, uh, police activity, law enforcement activity against some of these botnet operators where it made sense and they've taken them down. Microsoft, there's always a good job with That. There's always one to pop back up on these Things.

Yeah, well, that's the problem. It's a bit of a whack-a-mole game. And now, and now all these hacktivists are renting those services to bombard anybody that you happen to Disagree.

Well, yes, you can rent, you could rent a DDoS storm. What JP said about me earlier, I think I might rent a DDoS. Jp, what's your address?

Uh, I think you're taking this a little too personal. Well, No, but Steven, the, the key is though, after you ddo them, then you come in and offer to, to, uh, Oh, so the, to defend So the old mafioso. Yeah, exactly.

I break, I have a kid break your window and then I You shame of something happened, right? Yeah. Um, but, but you know, to Steven's point earlier about IOT devices, you know, you have Amazon, you have Google, right?

They're, they're hosting the network services for a lot of these devices. I, I, hopefully they're smart enough and, you know, their equipment is becoming enabled, uh, with, you know, enough compute power and, and os that it could be compromised. So I hope, I mean, I hope they're smart enough that when these devices are coming online and connecting back home, that they're doing so through a VPN level connection, I, we don't know because we don't own those devices.

We can't see how they're connecting. But think about, and I don't mean to pick on them, I don't know anything about them, but Honeywell, my, my, my, uh, thermostats connect back to Honeywell. I haven't seen Honeywell in the news talk out and stepping up about their advanced capabilities for security and DDoS protection.

They're now, maybe they're delegated through a Microsoft and partnership or Google partnership protect themselves, but Honeywell's now the risk is on them. They're the ones who are capable of now opening up, uh, potential for IOT devices on their network to be compromised. Yeah.

Well, and to that point, I think a lot of these companies with IOT devices are finding out that this is a challenge. Um, I'm pretty mad at BMW because they shut off third party integration with their connected drive experience, uh, last month. The reason they did that is because it was, uh, realized that there was almost no security on it, and anyone could find out the status of anyone's car.

And, uh, actually, right, uh, settings including unlock to anyone's car, uh, that's not great. And so they shut it off immediately. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of abandoned wear out there.

There's a lot of just, just garbage out. There you go. You go buy an iot, you know, an off-brand IOT switch or thermostat or something.

You don't know how well that's protected. It's probably not. And it's certainly not gonna get any kind of security updates.

Uh, that's the world we live in. And I think a lot of respectable and responsible companies, like I said, like BMW, I'm kind of mad that they shut it off, but I'm glad that they did too, because I'd rather not have my car unlock by somebody over the internet. So, wait, is there an opportunity here for somebody to, I don't know, sell a managed botnet?

Let's not use jps metaphor. Let's go with an extermination service so that I get rid of all my infected devices and, you know, I'm just gonna pay extra for the privilege. Or is this something that just, you know, I'm the cdm, Nobody gonna pay for this.

I think about that. Well, somebody need to pay for this government who, you know, government, And we don't own the devices, right? So I, I don't have access to my Amazon doc.

I can't get inside it. I can't, you know, uh, exterminate anything that's in it. I can't, it's not on me, Right?

And, and so this, and we don't have time 'cause we're way over time on this, but if you look at the, it was DigiCert and a bunch of people put together an industry consortium for these connected devices. And it, it starts with, it starts with each connected device having its own unique MAC address and its own unique certificates, PKI certificates, and so that you can reach in and control individual iot devices, but only if they've been built to do so. And, and there are several industry consortiums around that.

I, I've actually done some work in there over the years, but, um, at the end of the day, they're all still connected. And the bad guys always seem to find a way. But we gotta take a break.

There's a great conversation, great topic, but we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about the Tennessee Titans. No, not those titans. Different data center titans.

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Black cloak, digital executive protection, defending the new attack surface your personal life. Hey folks, we're back in. Yeah, we're talking about Tennessee home of the TVA, and turns out there's a report that says that the state of Tennessee, followed by Texas, is now number two for AI data center deployments.

And of course, you know, California and Virginia are probably number one and two overall. But it's interesting to see that there's been a shift in terms of where these AI workloads are showing up. Jp, did any of this surprise you in here?

And are we using, you know, government funded electricity to drive these data centers in Tennessee? It, it Wasn't, it was a little surprising only because, uh, geographically, my experience was at North Carolina was on the rise. Uh, back when I was, uh, at EMC, um, there were a number of data centers that were being built in North Carolina, all very modern.

The access to the cooler temperatures, uh, fresh water, uh, and electricity, you know, made them a optimal site for building out data centers. Now, it seems that people have found, uh, that Tennessee also meets the same requirements. You know, it's like, um, a little bit like, you know, the old Star Trek or, uh, sci-fi shows where they're out there looking for a planet that meets your, you know, needs for life and support.

You know, if, if we find the place that, you know, they're gonna settle it, and, you know, to the matrix point, right? They become parasites and start to overpower and destroy the environment. Uh, and that's what the report kind of is saying.

It's like, all right, you know, these, uh, these, these beasts that are, uh, in need of massive compute power, especially around AI, are identifying, you know, environmentally good places to put a data center, uh, that supports their needs, but they're destroying the environment that is around it. And, uh, and these are, uh, uh, areas that are impacted by climate and other events that are going on. And the recommendation was, you know, for, you know, start looking at places that aren't so environmentally impacted like the Midwest.

Uh, and of course, you know, the Midwest has its own issues for why it hasn't, you know, risen up with regard to becoming a, uh, titan of, you know, support for building out these facilities. And, but the reasons are, I I, I to the, and I agree with their report on this is, is because y you know, it's easy. It, it, you know, I have everything I need to run my data center in these areas, so it makes sense for me to do it.

It's more work to do it. And obviously a little costlier in the Midwest, but I, I do less damage to the surrounding environments. And, uh, I think you're going to, and it would take regulation to force these companies to start to, or, or incentive.

I mean, the states that one of their, uh, one of the, um, uh, suggestions was the state should be incenting the businesses to come there. And by helping 'em and partnering with them, I think they should. I, I do think it's that, you know, these other areas are being inundated and it's over.

It's starting to overwhelm the environment. Well, Before we go any further though, I just gotta say this, Mike, the New deal called they want their TVA back boomer, I don't know how many people out here actually know the TVA or how big a, a player it is in, in the energy, uh, energy space, you know, creating electricity. But Steven, I thought Ohio was the new data center capital.

What's going on? Hey, I ain't the governor of Ohio. What Do I know?

Lucky For you. No, I, and for us, Yeah, I think I'm gonna miss out on that election too. Um, but I would point out that, uh, there's actually a very specific thing happening in Tennessee, and that is that in Memphis, xai is building the world's largest GPU powered supercomputer, the Colossus.

2 million, uh, GPU chips being, you know, that have been deployed in Tennessee. Well, um, publicly, 200,000 of those or, you know, are, um, part of a single, uh, AI supercomputer run by Xai. And so that is, you know, a significant proportion of that entire footprint.

Now, obviously, there are others as well, and we're seeing build outs and data centers everywhere. But I think that the fact that Xai has, um, focused on Memphis specifically, they've got at least two data center locations there, they have at least two, um, colossal AI supercomputers deployed there. Uh, that alone, that single investment could skew the results and skew the conversation we're having.

You know, maybe apart from that, it's Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, whatever. It's certainly wouldn't be part of the equation if it hadn't been for XAI. And I should also point out that that's been very controversial because, um, despite the fact that on their own homepage they have a community and environmental responsibility page, uh, the community seems to disagree with the level of community responsibility and environmental responsibility they've shown there, uh, using, uh, things like portable gas powered turbines to power their data center rather than, you know, because they can't get enough grid power in there, things like that.

And, um, I, I would say, you know, there certainly is a conversation to be had, but, um, it's an example of what happens when companies are allowed to essentially shop jurisdictions for these data centers. They can go around and they can say, you know, who wants it? Who wants this kind of investment?

Uh, Memphis raised their hands. And so, you know, here we go, XAI ported in there, and suddenly Tennessee's on the map next time, you know, maybe Des Moines will raise their hands, or, you know, Albuquerque. And then what?

Well, then we'll have somebody else on the map. And, you know, I think it shows frankly, a, a, a weakness overall of, uh, governmental planning and, um, environmental planning, uh, site planning, power planning, that these things are just being built sort of wherever they can build them, and that, that shifts the landscape so deeply. So is it safe to say we're walking down to Memphis?

Sure. See, I was gonna do a whole oh, brother, where art out, they're building the dam. They're lighting up the whole valley.

It's gonna be a new South, You know, Uhhuh. So, so, so, wait, can we, so there's an economic cost here, right? I mean, if I understand this correctly, the value of the real estate around the data center drops, and then of course, the data center, people buy it even cheaper, and more people are mo gonna move to places where there are not data centers.

So the value of real estate will go up in places where there is no data center, because more people who used to live next to a data center are trying to move in there. Is this, wouldn't he get? So, I, I, I don't think that that's really what happens.

I think that basically the underprivileged people who live where these things are built can't move and don't have any, uh, you know, real mobility opportunity. And so they just get stuck with breathing bad air and, uh, listening to loud noise and paying more for electricity. It's the love can now say job, but I mean, but l let's be fair though, you can't blame Memphis.

You can't blame Ohio or North Carolina, or, or Abilene, Texas, or any of these places that are, you know, bending over backwards to welcome in these data centers because, you know, they're being, they're being, uh, romanced and corded by millions, tens of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment locally, the promise of major jobs. Even though we know that these AI data centers are not very labor intensive in terms of job creation, uh, you know, the, the federal government is patting them on the back saying, go for it. Go for it, go for it.

And they're in competition. Memphis doesn't wanna lose to Nashville. Nashville doesn't wanna lose to Charlotte.

Charlotte doesn't wanna lose to Raleigh, Texas doesn't wanna lose to California, and none of us wanna lose to Mexico. And so, you know what, what's the right answer here? I don't know if there's a right answer.

I Have a question that I would love to get your opinion on. Um, so right now, AI data data centers are being called critical national security infrastructure, right? 0, but the Pentagons, a lot of the cloud capabilities you've seen the contracts that, um, Microsoft and AWS have inked with the US government, but you've got, um, military national security running on commercial infrastructure.

So they are depending on the same data center, maybe that, you know, is, is is giving me Netflix, right? But now we have the power consumption concerns. And for years they've talked about the fragility of the power infrastructure in the United States.

They are projecting that the data centers are really going to overwhelm, um, Northern Virginia, they are saying by 2030, instead of just two or three hours of, uh, power interruptions per year, it could go up to more than 400 hours of power interruptions per year. So now, if you loop that back, now, you know, what kind of national security issues are we running up against if we do not have a reliable backbone? I mean, clearly, uh, power is the bottleneck for AI factories.

And whether we talk about building thorium, small reactors, or these nuclear reactors that go in like a container or I, I don't mean a docker container, I mean like a shipping container, um, or, you know, some other, you know, because hope that the, the, the Idiocracy of the whole thing is at the same time we're saying, wait a second, let's stop investing in in solar and, and wind and renewable clean energies, even though they hands down are the biggest driver. Steven's an expert on this, he could tell us, right? Steven, like 90% of the power coming on was, was coming from renewables.

An awful lot of it was, yes, sir, there's a lot of gas turbines, but there ain't no nuclear despite the, the, the, the legend and rumor, there ain't no, uh, new oil and coal and so on. For the most part, it's, uh, it's been solar and wind, but that's all changing now. And, um, in here, in the United States, at least in other countries, uh, you know, I mean, China has built out, uh, in Mongolia, uh, enough power to basically replace the everything in the United States.

And they're using that to power their data centers. And, uh, along with their industrial expansion, um, it would've been good if the US had, uh, made similar investments. So, Alan, will this become a political issue to the point, whereas Tip O'Neill once pointed out all politics being local, that the people in these local communities are gonna start voting out the quote unquote bums who made these deals, and maybe they're gonna be a little bit of a rebellion in the process.

So it already is a political issue right? Now. Look, my my son recently left Abilene, Texas where he was based for a year and a half.

I could tell you it was a tremendous feather in the cap of ABIs or whatever they call people from Abilene, uh, that they were building out these huge data factories, these huge AI factories there. It may be a case where all of a sudden, oh, they didn't tell me they were putting a coal plant in too, right? And, and that, and, you know, grandpa has black lung now, and, um, you know, then all of a sudden it's a different tune.

But right now, I think cities are vying to, you know, in this lottery of who's going to get these giant mega, uh, factories, AI factories, but that, that may change. But anyway, we, we we're over time already on this one. We've been just pontificating a bit.

Let's come back though. We talk. Let's hear about company.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back. And yes, we're talking about Nokia that pledged $4 billion to accelerate AI networking specifically and here in the United States.

And, um, of course, the issue, I think in a lot of people's minds, or maybe most folks don't realize that Nokia owns Bell Labs, which is one of the predominant research facilities here in the us and I think they're trying to maybe make sure that nobody in Washington comes after them for being a, uh, com a company that's fundamentally based over in Scandinavia. Steven, what's your take on what's going on here and will other networking companies kind of step up because, well, we haven't heard a lot from networking companies in this whole AI investment space. Yeah, I think that Nokia is really, um, taking, uh, well, you know, they're kind of stepping outta the shadows here.

Uh, they have new management. Um, it's been very aggressive, uh, a new American born CEO who's very interested in putting Nokia on the forefront of networking technology. And they have done some really remarkable things to, uh, to, to move that forward.

Uh, key among those is hiring a bunch of incredible people, as you said, uh, you know, making incredible investments as well, um, but also focusing really on, you know, practical technologies. Uh, you know, they're thing doing things, uh, using things like SR. Linux, um, their IXR, which we saw at Networking Field, A 39.

Uh, all of these things are really key to putting Nokia on the map as generally a networking company, but of course, it's 2025. So if you're a networking company, you know, you're looking at selling into the AI space, and of course that is a very, very tasty market. Um, you know, you look out at what's happening in the market, there's a lot of OM stuff using, um, Broadcom especially, uh, silicon.

Uh, there's a lot of investment happening from companies like Cisco, uh, like HPE, uh, trying to push into that market as well. Um, obviously, you know, if you're a company like Net Nokia that has really solid, uh, interconnecting technologies, switches and, and so on, you're gonna be looking at that market too. So I would say, you know, kind of stepping away from the sort of political aspect of making promises to invest in America, I think there's sort of a, a nuts and bolts business aspect that's happening here, and that Nokia is trying to establish itself, it found the right market for its products, and it's stepping up if you do wanna learn more about that.

By the way, we did post the, uh, networking field day presentations from Nokia on the Techstrong tv. Uh, you can also find those at the Tech Field Day YouTube channel. And, uh, to the point of this story, we're actually gonna hear a lot more about this at our AI infrastructure field day coming up where Nokia is gonna be presenting basically the technology that's, uh, underlying this announcement.

Jp, are the workloads gonna become more distributed? I kind of feel like when I look at these data centers today for ai, they're kinda like, you know, a replay of these massive mainframes, but are the workloads gonna get more distributed across networks, not only within the data center, but between the data centers? Uh, I think there's an issue that I, I'm seeing, or, or that I read about as well, that the, that raises question to that, which is, uh, do we want to put the responsibility and, and, and our capabilities in the hands of a few number of companies that are owning all this infrastructure?

And right now, in fact, the article I read was about that there is concern and some professors somewhere has come out and stated that this is breaking, uh, anti monopolistic practices and, and laws of the United States For years. Hold on. Am I, am I in a dystopian time warp?

The whole god damn economy's run by eight or nine companies, forget just the data centers, that's the, the, the story of our existence right now, 80% of the gain in the s and p 500 is, is on seven companies. Half of the U-S-G-D-P growth is on AI stuff. Now you're worried about a concentration in too few hands.

Well, maybe I always worry, Don, Don't close the now the passion point. I'm found A passion, something you're passionate about, Al I am passionate. Maybe I think this is A, maybe, maybe a disaster.

Maybe. Maybe the way to resolve that particular issue is to distribute more of the workloads, though other places besides those eight companies. Jp, That's not what happens though.

People, people don't want to, it's always the same old problem vendor. Lockin still happens. People, you know, the more that companies do to try to avoid vendor lockin, the more expensive it gets.

Um, vendor lockin, you know, that, that for the, that's the ongoing rage I'm gonna avoid. I'm gonna go outta my way and cripple and hurt, you know, and cause extra pain to myself because I don't wanna commit to any one of these vendors because I might wanna move and look, we've all been trained by the mobile companies on this problem. Yeah.

A few people in it have suffered small pains of this over years. But the world as a whole has learned this lesson from the mobile companies, right? Think about how hard it is to change your mobile phone provider, okay?

They, they've tried to make it easier, right? You know, we'll switch your phones, but it's the most painful thing in the world. My phones are different.

I have to swap out all my phones because my phones only work on their network. And, you know, it's painful. And the same thing occurs with these systems, right?

And just commit, you know, deal with it, right? It, it, we now have AI coding throw away what you got rebuild the tomorrow with Claude. So at the risk of sounding jaded, Us jaded, that wasn't jaded.

Actually. No, no, No, no. I'm, I, I, I'm, you know, I'm gonna say something at the risk of sounding jaded, what's a measly 4 billion bucks today?

Well, two and a half weeks of, of, uh, profit. Yeah. Think, think about it this way.

Um, these things are not, you know, storage and networking, you know, the entire industry. I could fit into a, um, a sidebar or footnote at the, uh, annual reports of these massive AI companies, simply because they're spending so much money, a $4 billion investment, though, I mean, step away from it. I, I'm sorry to do this, but let's have, let's focus back on the topic here, which was Nokia making an investment, right?

Um, a $4 billion investment would be a massive investment for a company of the scale of Nokia. Absolutely. And would really move the needle in terms of the network infrastructure, you know, AI hardware, AI connectivity, AI ops, um, yes, it's not huge in comparison to the amount of money that's being spent on these AI data centers, but it is huge in comparison to the size of the enterprise and HPC networking market.

But another No, You add the value though. Can, can they really do it? I mean, you know, do they have the, uh, you know, the resources and the staff to really make a difference here?

And from a, from a, you know, research perspective? Well, they're, that's what this investment is going for. They're gonna be spending a huge amount of money, uh, trying, but they're Not only spending, they are going to get, uh, federal broadband subsidies, right?

So there is $42 billion in federal broadband subsidies available. It's called the, uh, the bead program, broadband equity access and deployment, right? Nokia, they, I think it was last year, they became the first technology vendor to self-certify that all of their fiber products are built in America.

Um, what is it called? BABI, BABA compliant makes me think of compliant, right? And they right now, um, may be the only one.

So if anybody is looking at complying with that and getting part of that $42 billion pot, which I'm sure Nokia has a great head start on, they're probably gonna go to Nokia because Nokia is already certified. And that is a very good point. I think that hope is really the crux of what Nokia is promising here.

They're saying we are the American supplier, which is ironic considering that they, you know, were a European country, uh, company, but now they're, they're saying like, look, we are the buy American, uh, supplier, and that could move the needle. Good For them. That's like going to IKEA for the 4th of July.

Is that what you're saying? Yes. That's very American.

Now, you know, I love Ikea. I love the meatball. Well, good for Nokia though, guys, I hate to do this to you, but we're about outta time for today's episode.

I wish we could go on more about it, uh, just having some fun. But we'll be back tomorrow and we can talk about it some more, talk about stuff some more. But for now, hope, jp, Steven, Mike, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this. Um, as usual, we have a full tech, strong TV lineup immediately following the gang today with some great stuff, I think including some of our most recent CubeCon coverage.

And I think we might, well, Stephen, any the short week I know, but not much Tech Field Day on this week. Well, we don't have, um, new Tech Field day presentations, but of course, we've got the brand new, uh, security Boulevard podcast and the new utilizing AI podcast both this week on, uh, tech Strong AI and Security Boulevard. Excellent.

So stay tuned for that. And you can get those podcasts, by the way, on whatever your favorite podcast platform of choice. But, and In America, it's Thanksgiving this week.

Thursday is Thanksgiving, but we'll be here. We'll be here, uh, tomorrow. Hey, I wanna, I wanna point out that Techstrong Gang and Tech strong TV is made in America.

You're willing to certify that. How do I know where Steven is today? Today, I literally, I almost fell off my chair.

Hope, is there Anything, I'm actually coming to you from my, my secret layer beneath a volcano in St. Lucia. Yeah.

So you can Do whatever you Want, but hope is, does that, can we qualify for any kind of government billion dollar handouts for that? You know what? I, I, I bet there is some way to work that out.

I tell you. Let's, let's, let's ask Claude. All righty, let's Go back to the beginning, to the AI story.

I think, look, we've descended. We're gonna pull the plug right here. Everyone have a great day.

We'll see you tomorrow. This Alan Shimel, we're out.