Cisco unveils comprehensive strategy for AI-ready data centres

Cisco announced a bold new strategy to simplify, secure, and future-proof data centres, enabling organisations of all sizes to confidently scale their AI ambitions. This initiative, underscored by significant partnerships and product innovations, reinforces Cisco's pivotal role in building the foundational networking infrastructure for the AI era. The company revealed it had already surpassed its annual target of USD 1 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers in Q3 FY25, a full quarter ahead of schedule, demonstrating strong market momentum.

The core of Cisco's announcements revolves around preparing enterprises and service providers for what the company terms the "agentic era of AI," where autonomous AI agents will drive a massive increase in demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency, and power-efficient data centre networking. Cisco asserts its position at the forefront of delivering the advanced, secure networking technology essential for these future AI-ready data centres.

To simplify, secure, and modernise enterprise AI infrastructure, Cisco introduced several key innovations. The new Unified Fabric Experience with Nexus, available in July 2025, aims to streamline network operations by converging ACI and NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics. This is managed through a Unified Nexus Dashboard, providing a single pane of glass for LAN, SAN, IPFM, and AI/ML fabrics. To maximise AI networking performance, Cisco unveiled Intelligent Packet Flow, available now, which dynamically steers traffic across AI fabrics using real-time telemetry and congestion awareness, enabling proactive issue detection. Furthermore, Cisco and NVIDIA demonstrated a significant technical integration of Cisco G200-based switches and NVIDIA NICs, showcasing NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking powered by Cisco Silicon One, supporting NX-OS, Nexus Hyperfabric AI, and SONiC deployments.

Cisco is also expanding its AI PODs, offering more flexible and scalable solutions for diverse AI workloads, including training and fine-tuning. This expansion aligns with NVIDIA's innovation timeline, with the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU now orderable with Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers. For secure AI adoption, Cisco AI Defence and Cisco Hypershield are now included in the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design, providing visibility, validation, and runtime protection for end-to-end enterprise AI workflows, including AI agents built with open models and optimised with NVIDIA NIM and NeMo microservices. Additionally, new 400G bidirectional (BiDi) optics, available in the second half of 2025, will facilitate easy and cost-efficient transitions to 400G networks while preserving existing fibre infrastructure.

Recognising the emergence of a new "Neocloud" market driven by increasing demand for GPU-as-a-service and Infrastructure-as-a-service providers, Cisco is playing a leading role in helping these new providers establish their footprints. The company announced strategic partnerships with key players in this emerging market. These include HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's new AI enterprise, which is collaborating with Cisco to build open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure using Cisco Nexus, UCS, Hypershield, and Splunk. Cisco also announced a strategic collaboration with G42, the UAE-based global technology group, to advance AI innovation and infrastructure development. Furthermore, Cisco has 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.

For service providers, Cisco's Agile Services Networking architecture is designed not only to manage the evolving traffic characteristics of AI but also to enable monetisation of new AI-driven services. This includes new converged access and edge router devices powered by Cisco Silicon One, expanding the Cisco 8000 series portfolio. Cisco also introduced an Agentic AI for Service Providers framework for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation, leveraging AI capabilities to accelerate operations and decision-making through a multi-agentic approach for autonomous networking. Lastly, Cisco is enabling Non-terrestrial (satellite) Networking with seamless integration between terrestrial and satellite networks. This architecture supports robust service assurance, dynamic resource allocation, and new monetisation opportunities in remote and underserved sectors such as maritime, aviation, IoT, and disaster response.