Cisco Sees Surge in AI Infrastructure Orders as Enterprise Spending Shifts
Cisco's CEO Chuck Robbins says AI deployments are reshaping enterprise infrastructure spending as companies weigh the pros and cons of running customer service models in public cloud or on premises. The networking company is seeing a surge in orders for AI infrastructure, with Nexus switch orders rising more than 85% sequentially in the fourth quarter.
Cisco expects hyperscaler AI infrastructure revenue to reach $7.5 billion in fiscal 2027, up from $4 billion in fiscal 2026. The company's own use of AI provides an indication of where it believes enterprise adoption is heading, with its proprietary on-premises AI assistant, Circuit, handling over 75 million prompts in the fourth quarter.
The shift towards more workload-by-workload decisions on which models to use and where to run them is driving demand for infrastructure that can connect and secure AI workloads across multiple environments. Cisco's Cloud Control platform is designed as a common management layer across networking, security, compute, and observability, with AI Canvas allowing human operators and AI agents to investigate operational issues using the same underlying context.
The company also expects customers to invest more in private data centre networking, as sensitive data, latency requirements, model economics, and regulatory constraints make a single cloud-first approach difficult for some workloads. Chuck said, 'Is it a cost issue, a security issue, a sovereignty issue? The answer is yes.'