Feeding the AI Factory: The Role of DPU/IPUs in AI Infrastructure

Panel discussion featuring Tina Tsou (Board Chair, LF Edge), Rajalaxmi Angadi (Senior Engineering Manager, Intel) and Paul Pindell (F5 Networks) As AI clusters scale to 800G+ fabrics, system performance is no longer constrained solely by raw GPU compute, but by data movement, storage I/O, and infrastructure overhead. Modern AI factories require a fundamental decoupling of application logic from infrastructure tasks—offloading virtual networking, NVMe-oF storage access for KV caches, security enforcement, and telemetry to dedicated Data and Infrastructure Processing Units (DPUs/IPUs). This panel brings together industry leaders to discuss how DPUs and IPUs reclaim host CPU/GPU cycles, enforce hardware-isolated security air gaps, and optimize AI job completion times (JCT) across multi-tenant AI clusters. Crucially, the discussion will highlight the central role of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) Project in preventing vendor lock-in. The panel will explore how OPI’s unified northbound abstractions—such as standardized gRPC APIs, gNMI telemetry, and the community-driven DPU Operator—allow cloud providers and enterprise operators to manage heterogeneous silicon under a single, open AI factory blueprint.