Cisco Partners with Supermicro to Expand Secure AI Factory

Cisco Systems has strengthened its AI infrastructure strategy through a partnership with Supermicro to expand the Cisco Secure AI Factory. This expansion includes offering Supermicro's liquid- and air-cooled systems and support, providing customers access to rack-scale and dense GPU systems.

The key technologies involved in the Secure AI Factory include Cisco's AI Networking, Distributed Security, and Splunk, as well as Supermicro's NVIDIA NVL72 rack-scale AI systems and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software. This partnership positions Cisco as the first NVIDIA technology partner to deliver an NCP-compliant reference architecture built on partner-developed networking.

Cisco sees this combination as a supply-chain de-risking tool at a time when component availability is constraining how quickly rack-scale systems can ship. Evercore ISI views the partnership as an extension of Cisco's AI infrastructure strategy that improves its position in neocloud and sovereign deals, where the company can now deliver on compute capabilities.