You’re Scaling on Infrastructure You Don’t Control

About this episode

The episode discusses the unseen infrastructure decisions that impact cloud strategies and regional expansions.

You're making infrastructure decisions on a system you can't see. It's fast, stable, and invisible. That's the problem. Underneath it, global capacity is planned years in advance, routes are shaped by geopolitics, and resilience depends on infrastructure you don't control. Max Clark sits down with TS Narayanan, CTIO of EXA Infrastructure, to explain the layer most enterprise buyers never see — and why it quietly determines whether your cloud strategy, your regional expansion, and your infrastructure commitments actually deliver what you paid for. They get into why AI isn't driving the traffic spike everyone assumes, what geopolitical risk actually does to a network route, why adding nodes costs more than buyers expect, and where the real constraint is right now (hint: it's not bandwidth). If you've ever signed a provider contract without fully understanding what sits underneath it, this is the episode that fills in the gap. WHAT WE GET INTO 00:00 — The network layer your vendor isn't explaining to you 04:00 — Why capacity is locked in years before you make a decision 09:30 — The AI traffic myth: what's actually growing on the backbone 12:30 — Why your cloud usage growing doesn't…

People in this episode

Host: Max Clark

Guest: TS Narayanan

Topics covered

• infrastructure decisions
• cloud strategy
• geopolitical risk
• AI traffic
• network routes
• capacity planning

Keywords

• infrastructure
• cloud strategy
• geopolitics
• AI traffic
• network capacity
• subsea cable

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: EXA Infrastructure

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