Cisco AI-Ready Networking Innovations Unveiled

Cisco unveiled groundbreaking innovations to simplify, secure, and future-proof data centers, empowering organizations to scale their AI ambitions with confidence.

Cisco’s leadership in hyperscale and AI infrastructure-as-a-service markets demonstrates the foundational role that secure, resilient networking plays in the data center architecture. In Q3 FY25, Cisco notably surpassed its annual target of $1 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers a full quarter ahead of schedule.

Cisco's latest innovations

Cisco's latest innovations enable enterprises and service providers to continue to accelerate

Building on this momentum, Cisco's latest innovations enable enterprises and service providers to continue to accelerate the transformation of their infrastructure for the AI era. 

These innovations underscore Cisco’s unique position as a trusted partner for hyperscale builders, neocloud providers, enterprises, and service providers, enabling the entire ecosystem to evolve and meet the demands of AI-driven workloads.

Secure networking technology

"The world is moving from chatbots intelligently answering our questions to agents conducting tasks and jobs fully autonomously. This is the agentic era of AI,” said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco.

“As billions of AI agents begin working on our behalf, the demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency, and power-efficient networking for data centers will soar. Cisco is at the forefront, delivering advanced, secure networking technology that’s foundational to the AI-ready data centers of the future.”

AI-ready infrastructure

“The criticality of secure connectivity becomes more apparent as AI use expands across the enterprise,” said Matt Kimball, Moor Insights & Strategy. “Cisco’s ability to deliver AI-ready infrastructure to its customers, along with its investment in AI-enabled operations differentiates the company."

"It is this kind of partner and customer-first thinking that leads to AI-powered tools that abstract the complexity associated with deploying and managing AI infrastructure. AI reaching its full potential is dependent on a resilient network on which partners build and deliver solutions and services."

Simplifying, securing, and modernizing AI infrastructure

Cisco provides enterprise customers with new solutions to modernize their data centers

Enterprises need to evolve and build out their current infrastructure to support their unique AI workloads, all without adding complexity or sacrificing safety and security. Cisco provides enterprise customers with new solutions to modernize their data centers, including hardware innovation and more powerful, simplified management capabilities. 

Cisco is also continuing to build on its relationship with NVIDIA to deliver validated infrastructure solutions, and to provide a safe and secure foundation for AI agents built with open models.

New innovations

• New Unified Fabric Experience with Nexus: Customers will be able to simplify network operations and enhance operational efficiency across environments, converging ACI and NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics with unified data, control, policy enforcement, and management. The Unified Nexus Dashboard consolidates services across LAN, SAN, IPFM, and AI/ML fabrics into a single pane of glass. These capabilities will be available in the next Nexus Dashboard release in July 2025.
• Maximize AI Networking Performance: Customers can optimize AI workload operations with Cisco Intelligent Packet Flow. Available now, it dynamically steers traffic using real-time telemetry and congestion awareness across AI fabrics. With “end-to-end" visibility across networks, GPUs, and distributed AI jobs, more issues are detected proactively.  Additionally, Cisco and NVIDIA showed progress towards a unified architecture; at Cisco Live, the companies showcased the first technical integration of Cisco G200-based switches and NVIDIA NICs, demonstrating NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking based on Cisco Silicon One that supports NX-OS, Nexus Hyperfabric AI and SONiC deployments.
• Expanded AI PODs: New configurable AI PODs enhance flexibility and scalability for diverse AI workloads, including training and fine-tuning. Cisco also continues to align with NVIDIA’s innovation timeline; the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU  is now available to order with Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers. Together, the companies continue to work towards delivering validated solutions as part of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
• Enabling Safe, Secure AI Adoption with NVIDIA: Cisco AI Defense and Cisco Hypershield provide visibility, validation and runtime protection of the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow, and are now included in the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design. With AI Defense, enterprises can secure AI agents built with pioneering open models and optimized with NVIDIA NIM and NeMo microservices.
• Optics for Simple Upgrades: New 400G bidirectional (BiDi) optics enables customers to easily transition to 400G networks while preserving their existing duplex multi-mode fiber infrastructure ensuring cost efficiency, scalability and enhanced data center performance. The new optics will be available in the second half of the calendar year 2025.

Building up a new Neocloud market

Cisco is playing a pioneering role in helping these providers establish their footprints

As demand for AI-powered outcomes continues to increase, organizations are exploring new ways to scale quickly and stay adaptable, leading to the emergence of new GPU-as-a-service and Infrastructure-as-a-service providers – a new Neocloud market. 

Cisco, building on its expertise in designing and building some of the world’s largest networks for global service providers, is playing a pioneering role in helping these providers establish their footprints.

Announced partnerships

• HUMAIN: Saudi Arabia’s new AI enterprise is working with Cisco to help build the world’s most open, scalable, resilient and cost-efficient AI infrastructure using Cisco Nexus, UCS, Hypershield and Splunk.
• G42: The UAE-based global technology group announced a strategic collaboration with Cisco, laying the groundwork to advance AI innovation and infrastructure development across public and private sectors.
• Stargate UAE: Cisco joined the Stargate UAE consortium as a preferred technology partner, providing advanced networking, security and observability solutions to accelerate the deployment of next-generation AI compute clusters.

Setting up service providers for success in the AI era

Cisco’s Agile Services Networking architecture is designed not just to handle the increase and change in network traffic characteristics of AI, but also to fundamentally shift service providers’ network architectures so they can support and monetize new kinds of services.

New innovations

• New Devices: New converged access and edge router devices, powered by Cisco Silicon One. These devices expand the Cisco 8000 series portfolio, which has allowed service providers to reach new levels of network efficiency and functionality.
• Agentic AI For Service Providers: A new multi-agentic framework for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation with AI capabilities to help accelerate operations and decision-making. This framework allows service providers to solve their most complex challenges through Cisco-built and customer-built AI agents, all working together towards a vision of autonomous networking.
• Non-terrestrial (satellite) Networking: Seamless integration between terrestrial and satellite networks. This architecture supports robust service assurance, dynamic resource allocation, and new monetization opportunities in remote, underserved sectors like maritime, aviation, IoT, and disaster response.