Research|TPU 8t/8i and Virgo Network: the biggest networking upgrade since TPU v4 — and another major win for optics (one we called early)

Going through Google’s two recent technical posts — on Virgo Network Introducing Virgo Network megascale data center fabric | Google Cloud Blog and TPU 8t/8i TPU 8t and TPU 8i technical deep dive | Google Cloud Blog — what stands out is how much of it aligns with what we had already outlined months ago.

https://funda.ai/reports/deepai-infra-2026-shifting-from-brain

https://funda.ai/reports/deeplite-googles-newly-introduced

Back then, in our note on the in-rack switch tray, we tried to unpack a key misconception: this upgrade wasn’t about replacing the 3D torus. The real change was happening in the DCN — the scale-out network.

We put it plainly:

“The in-rack switch tray represents a change in this DCN network, not in the scale-up network.”