Exclusive: Cisco expands Nvidia partnership for AI data center boom
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Jeetu Patel. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cisco is partnering with Supermicro to add high-powered AI servers to its Nvidia-backed infrastructure offering, expanding beyond networking to sell more of the equipment needed to run AI.
Why it matters: Cisco is leaning into its AI infrastructure business, betting that compute demand is not slowing anytime soon.
Driving the news: Cisco is working with Supermicro to add high-density, liquid- and air-cooled computing systems to its Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, the company told Axios.
- The systems will support Nvidia's next-generation platforms and are expected to become available in October.
- Cisco will sell the compute alongside its networking, security and observability products as a pre-validated system designed to make massive GPU clusters easier to deploy.
What they're saying: "Think about us as being the critical infrastructure for the AI era, and we will go support every architectural variance that there is," Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel told Axios.
- Cisco's bet is that as long as demand for AI infrastructure is there, it doesn't matter where AI ultimately runs.
- "We literally don't have a preference," Patel said, arguing Cisco can supply infrastructure whether customers use frontier models powered by hyperscalers, or use open-weight models, or even build on-prem or run AI locally.
Follow the money: Cisco has largely escaped the "SaaSpocalypse" that hammered software stocks this year, as investors increasingly view the company as a beneficiary of the physical AI buildout.
- That's in part because the company has leaned into hardware versus software, though Patel said both feed off of and into one another.
- The stock is up nearly 45% year-to-date.
Yes, but: The expansion pushes Cisco deeper into a market where partners like other hyperscalers and even Nvidia itself are also formidable competitors.
- Patel downplayed that tension, saying the areas where the companies compete remain small relative to where they complement each other.
The bottom line: Cisco is betting the AI infrastructure boom will benefit the networking and hardware parts of its business.
