David Maltz

Overview

David Maltz is a Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. He is a long-standing figure in large-scale networking, known for his work on datacenter network architecture. At OCP Global Summit 2025, Maltz joined Cisco's Rakesh Chopra on stage to validate the Silicon One P200 and Cisco 8223 router deployments. He described a 10+ year Microsoft-Cisco collaboration on making SONiC work at quality on routers, with accumulated depth knowledge enabling faster bootstrapping of each new Silicon One generation. Maltz confirmed that Microsoft deploys Silicon One ASICs across its entire network hierarchy — from top-of-rack tier-0 switches through tier-2 data center spines to regional spines serving 1–4+ GW power zones — using common software, tooling, and operational knowledge throughout. He also confirmed that Microsoft must stitch together AI training clusters across many geographic locations using WAN links, validating the scale-across network architecture case.