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Forget the old playbook of carrier hotels and cross-connects. We sit down with Dave Ward, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Lumen, to map the real shift to Cloud 2.0—an AI-driven rearchitecture of how data moves, where compute lives, and how enterprises keep control as speed and scale explode. Dave explains why data movement has become the bottleneck that decides AI ROI, and how distributed on-ramps, 400G to 1.6T connectivity, and network-as-a-service can shrink time-to-first-token while cutting operational drag.

We unpack the rise of neo clouds—GPU-first data centers with new commercial models—and what that means for planning training and inference. Instead of buying vague capacity, teams now rent defined GPU clusters for six to 36 months, often in nontraditional metros with power and cooling to match. That shift demands a new connectivity strategy that bypasses hourglass on-ramps and drives data directly to AI factories and hyperscalers. Dave makes the economics tangible: when moving a petabyte takes hours instead of days, GPUs stay busy, costs drop, and models get to work faster.

Control doesn’t have to disappear as DIY fades. Dave outlines how design, price, order, provision, and assurance can live in one digital platform, giving IT the same topology and policy control without the burden of racks and cross-connects. We cover why many SD-WAN and SASE deployments need deterministic bandwidth channels, how to build a data fabric across 30+ sources, and the practical first steps: inventory workloads, map your data flows, and match bandwidth to business outcomes. If you’re plotting an AI strategy without a network and data plan, you’re leaving value on the table.

If this conversation helps you think clearer about Cloud 2.0, follow the show, share with your team, and leave a quick review to help others find it. What’s the first workload you’d accelerate with a true high-speed data fabric?

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