Cisco Executive Warns of Network Capacity Crisis Due to AI Workloads

A US Senate subcommittee heard testimony from Cisco executive Bob Everson on the impact of AI on network infrastructure.

Cisco's chief architect for provider mobility noted that AI is driving a fourfold increase in AI inference traffic over eight months, with networks traditionally optimized for content flowing downstream now needing to handle two-way and uplink-intensive traffic.

Average campus and branch networks have seen a 34% increase in traffic tied to AI workloads over the last 12 months, and are expected to see a 96% increase this coming year, according to Everson.

Cisco's AI-native tools enable networks to reroute traffic, adjust capacity, or reconfigure network nodes when performance degradation or hardware failure is detected, increasing uptime and reliability for mission-critical services.