Faultline forecasted a VPU-fueled breakout at NAB 2025, and that moment has well and truly arrived. Front and center of this surge is Netint Technologies, whose Quadra VPU cards were omnipresent on the show floor. The tone of conversations has shifted from what VPUs are, to how to deploy them, adapt workflows, and, importantly, dodge the GPU tax. Leading the commercial charge is Akamai, making headlines with its launch of Cloud Accelerated Compute Instances powered by Netint’s Quadra T1U VPUs. This is Akamai’s first foray into ASIC-based acceleration, and by its own account, the first cloud provider to offer VPU-powered instances. The proposition is up to 20x throughput gains over CPUs, 14x stream density per compute unit when using HEVC,…