Ryder Cup Showcases AI-Ready Networking for Real-Time Decision-Making
Published on November 18, 2025 at 04:03 PM
The 2025 Ryder Cup, drawing nearly a quarter of a million spectators, served as a real-world stress test for AI-ready networking. Technology partner HPE created a central hub, providing tournament staff with a data visualization dashboard that supported operational decision-making, aggregating insights from real-time data feeds.
Jon Green, CTO of HPE Networking, emphasized the importance of networking in AI implementation, stating, "Disconnected AI doesn’t get you very much; you need a way to get data into it and out of it for both training and inference."
The event featured a Connected Intelligence Center ingesting data from various sources, including ticket scans, weather reports, and AI-enabled cameras. This data was analyzed through an operational intelligence dashboard, providing staff with an instantaneous view of activity across the grounds.
To handle the variability in spectator density, engineers built a two-tiered architecture with over 650 WiFi 6E access points and 170 network switches. This infrastructure maintained continuous connectivity and fed a private cloud AI cluster for live analytics.
Looking ahead, as businesses move towards physical AI applications, many are rethinking their architectures, deploying edge-based AI clusters to process information closer to the source. This shift is fueling a wave of operational repatriation, with workloads returning to on-premises infrastructure for enhanced speed and security.
AI is also helping make networks smarter. HPE, for example, analyzes anonymized data from billions of connected devices to identify trends and refine behavior over time. This is changing how enterprise networks are managed across industries, paving the way for self-driving networks that handle repetitive tasks and automatically fix issues.
Ultimately, the performance of the network increasingly defines the performance of the business, whether coordinating a live event or streamlining a supply chain. Building that foundation today will separate those who pilot from those who scale AI.