The DPU Awakening: Silicon Muscle for AI Mayhem
This week on Pop Goes the Stack, we crack open the next frontier of enterprise infrastructure: DPUs (Data Processing Units). AI factories aren’t just stressing your network—they’re setting it on fire. With east-west traffic exploding and inference storms growing by the day, CPUs and legacy firewalls just can’t keep up. Enter the DPU: purpose-built to offload, secure, and accelerate the chaos.
We break down:
- Why AI workloads are crushing traditional networking and security architectures
- How DPUs deliver line-rate telemetry, policy enforcement, and microsegmentation
- Where companies like NVIDIA (BlueField-3), AMD (Pensando), Intel, Marvell, Fungible, Microsoft (Azure Boost), and Cisco (Hypershield) are racing to redefine infrastructure
- Why financial institutions, hospitals, and hyperscalers are already deploying DPUs at scale
- What this means for your observability, east-west controls, and AI agent governance
The $5.5B DPU market isn’t a footnote—it’s a warning shot. If your stack isn’t built to segment, inspect, and enforce in real-time, it’s not ready for AI. And the next wave of agentic systems isn’t going to wait.
Creators and Guests
Host
Joel Moses
Distinguished Engineer and VP, Strategic Engineer at F5, Joel has over 30 years of industry experience in cybersecurity and networking fields. He holds several US patents related to encryption technique.
Host
Lori MacVittie
Distinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist at F5, Lori has more than 25 years of industry experience spanning application development, IT architecture, and network and systems' operation. She co-authored the CADD profile for ANSI NCITS 320-1998 and is a prolific author with books spanning security, cloud, and enterprise architecture.
