- Equinix’s Arun Dev argues it’s time to upgrade an old mantra: Now, “the network is the agent” - New Equinix Fabric Intelligence turns the network into a multi-agent system that can understand intent and take action - As cool as it is, it could take another year or two for agentic AI to really catch on, Dev said It’s one thing to say that networks will be critical foundational pillar underpinning AI and the agentic revolution. It’s quite another to assert that the network itself needs to become an intelligent agent. But that’s exactly what Arun Dev, Equinix VP of Interconnection, said needs to happen and exactly what the colocation provider is trying to achieve. Back in the 1980s, Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “the network is the computer.” Dev said that slogan needs an update. “In the AI era, we believe the network is the agent,” he told Fierce. And that change means updating the network so it can become “an agent in its own right,” one capable of understanding intent, enforcing policies and adapting to growing connectivity needs. Hence the launch of Equinix Fabric Intelligence. The company’s fabric offering itself has been around for more than a decade. But Dev said Equinix has been working since the launch of model context protocol (MCP) late last year to build in new agentic capabilities. According to Dev, Fabric Intelligence is a multi-agent system that uses specialized agents to perform specific tasks. So, for instance, there are lightweight models being used for pattern recognition and large language models that provide the conversational interface. The end result is a system that removes a lot of manual processes around provisioning and helps fill in enterprise skills gaps in deep networking expertise. To be fair, Lumen Technologies has been banging the drum about