Ram Velaga

Senior VP & GM of Core Switching Group, Broadcom

Search every verified Ram Velaga interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ram Velaga, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Core Switching Group at Broadcom, has been a prominent voice in discussions about AI infrastructure and networking in 2025 and early 2026. He has emphasized the role of Ethernet as the technology of choice for connecting large-scale AI clusters, arguing that it provides a clean interface between the network layer and XPUs (accelerators) and allows hyperscalers to innovate at their own pace without being constrained by proprietary full-stack specifications. Velaga introduced Broadcom's Tomahawk 6, a 102.4 Tbps switch, stating it can reduce the number of network tiers needed for clusters of over 100,000 GPUs from three to two, thereby cutting power and optics costs. He also discussed the Telco Cloud Platform 9, which runs virtual machines and containers on a single platform, and cited a case where a telco reduced its physical hosts from 5,000 to 1,700, achieving over $500 million in savings over five years. Velaga has described AI as a distributed computing problem where the network is critical to preventing XPUs from sitting idle 20 to 50% of the time. He has advocated for open ecosystems and standards, stating that no single company can own all components needed for large-scale data centers. Velaga also highlighted the growing importance of sovereign AI, arguing that private cloud models allow organizations to control their data and destiny by post-training large language models on their own information rather than relying on hyperscalers. He noted that over the next five years, approximately 124 gigawatts of additional capacity is expected to come online to support compute needs, translating to over 70 million additional XPUs.