Cisco has announced a major expansion of its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, giving customers a framework for deploying AI across their entire infrastructure – from central data centre to local sites where data is created and decisions are made.
Enterprises, neoclouds, sovereign clouds, and service providers can now move AI from pilot to full-scale production without stitching together disconnected systems, compressing deployment timelines from months to weeks and embedding security from the start.
“Most organisations understand the potential for AI to transform their businesses, but they’re navigating how to deploy the technology safely and at scale”, said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO, Cisco. “In partnership with NVIDIA, we’re solving that challenge with an architecture that sets a new standard for performance – making it simpler to deploy, operate, and secure AI infrastructure”.
“AI factories are transforming every industry, and security must be built into every layer – from silicon to software – to protect data, applications, and infrastructure”, said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Cisco are building the secure foundation for AI infrastructure – core to edge – so companies can scale intelligence with confidence”.
AI that runs everywhere, not just in the data centre
AI inference happens where data lives and decisions can’t wait, whether on the hospital floor or for analysing video of a factory floor in real-time to keep workers safe. This reality fundamentally reshapes infrastructure by requiring inference workloads to operate locally — closer to the data, the devices, and the moment a decision must be made. Cisco and NVIDIA are enabling organisations to support edge inferencing use cases by:
- Transforming the enterprise edge: Now supporting NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs across the Cisco UCS and Cisco Unified Edge portfolios, Cisco enables enterprises to run mission-critical AI workloads at the edge without the energy cost and footprint of data centre-scale hardware.
Driving performance and efficiency for massive-scale AI factories
Cisco is enhancing performance and simplifying how organisations deploy AI infrastructure at scale.
- Next-Generation Performance: Cisco’s latest high-speed switches power the most demanding AI workloads, including a new 102.4Tbps Cisco N9100 powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch silicon. This joins the now generally available 800G N9100 powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch silicon.
- Rapid Deployment: Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, now a part of Cisco Nexus One, will support Cisco N9000 Series switches, including the N9100 Series powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon. Now organisations can transform a complex, multi-vendor integration puzzle into a simple, full-stack solution to cut deployment times and reduce the burden on IT.
Security fused into every layer
In an era where AI models are high-value assets and agents are more autonomous, taking actions, making decisions and interacting with other agents – security can’t be an afterthought. Cisco is embedding protection into the fabric of the Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to safeguard against both external threats and rogue agent behaviour.
Cisco secures enterprise AI agent development
Building on Cisco’s commitment to fuse security into all layers of AI infrastructure, as well as the agentic workforce, Cisco also announced today that Cisco AI Defence will support and secure NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtimes – part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit – adding controls and guardrails to govern agent and claw actions.
Image Credit: Cisco
