Rakesh Chopra

Overview

Rakesh Chopra is SVP and Fellow, Hardware Architecture at Cisco, and is the lead architect behind the Silicon One ASIC family. At OCP Global Summit 2025, he presented Cisco's thesis that power — not bandwidth — is the fundamental constraint on AI infrastructure scaling, coining it "the great power constraint." He argued that training frontier models like GPT-5 already requires 50,000–100,000 GPUs, exceeding any single data center's power capacity, and that a new "scale-across" network tier is required to connect multi-datacenter AI training clusters. He announced the Cisco 8223 router series and the Alibaba co-designed QuantumCat, both powered by the new Silicon One P200 chip, demonstrating that a fully shared deep packet buffer architecture can deliver routing-level capabilities at switch-level power efficiency.