Research Notes

HPE Discover: Self-Driving Networks and AI Data Center Switching for the Agentic Enterprise

Steve McDowell June 23, 2026

At its recent HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a broad set of networking updates spanning AI data center switching, autonomous network operations, and unified secure access, extending its “self-driving” networking strategy into general availability across AI factories, data centers, campus, and edge environments.

Arista Networks’ Next-Generation 1.6 Terabit Portfolio for AI Fabrics

Steve McDowell June 16, 2026

Arista Networks recently announced its new 7060XE7 Series, a portfolio of 1.6 Terabit (1.6T) Ethernet switching platforms designed for rack-scale AI infrastructure. The announcement extends Arista’s Etherlink architecture from 800G to 1.6T and introduces three hardware configurations for air-cooled, liquid-cooled, and high-density 128-port deployments.

IBM’s LLM-Guided Evolutionary Framework for Quantum Error Correction Code Discovery

Steve McDowell June 16, 2026

IBM Research recently published a paper on an LLM-guided evolutionary framework for discovering quantum error-correction (QEC) codes, accompanied by the open-source release of OpenEvolve on GitHub. The framework applies evolutionary artificial intelligence techniques, originally developed for general program synthesis, to the domain of quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes.

Microsoft’s Majorana 2 Topological Quantum Chip

Steve McDowell June 9, 2026

Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2 at its recent Build developer conference in San Francisco, introducing its second-generation topological quantum chip and announcing the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI platform for scientific research and development.

Majorana 2 delivers qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than those in its predecessor, Majorana 1, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and peak instances approaching 1 minute.

Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design

Steve McDowell June 9, 2026

At the recent Computex 2026, Qualcomm introduced the Dragonwing IQ10 Robotics Reference Design (RRD), the company’s most concrete commitment to the physical AI market to date. The new platform consolidates compute, sensor interfaces, deterministic I/O, networking, and a layered software stack into a single enclosed reference design for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), industrial robotics, and humanoid platforms.

Microsoft: Project Solara & the Agentic Operating Plane for the Non-NVIDIA World

Steve McDowell June 7, 2026

At its recent Build 2026 event, Microsoft introduced Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform built specifically for devices whose primary interface is an AI agent. Solara