Cisco is seeing significant AI infrastructure demand and expects that growth to continue into next year, executives said as the company wrapped up its 2025 fiscal year. Cisco reported revenue of $14.7 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter, which is up 8% from a year ago, and annual 2025 revenue of $56.7 billion, which is up 5% from 2024.
Here are the key networking highlights from the call.
Webscalers tap into AI networking
Cisco received record AI infrastructure orders from webscale customers in Q4, according to CEO Chuck Robbins.
“These orders exceeded $800 million in the quarter, bringing the total for fiscal year ’25 to over $2 billion, [which is] more than double our original $1 billion target stated in Q4 of fiscal year ’24,” Robbins said on a conference call with analysts. “This demonstrates the undeniable capability and relevance of our technology for multiple back-end use cases with some of the most technologically advanced customers.”
Enterprise networking growth
Total product orders in Q4 grew 7% year over year, Robbins said.
“Enterprise product orders were up 5% year-over-year in Q4 [while] networking product orders grew double digits in Q4, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth,” Robbins said. “There is strong interest from customers in the new family of Cisco Catalyst 9000 smart switches, along with a completely refreshed lineup of highly secure routers, wireless access points, and industrial IoT devices, which are purpose-built for the AI-ready campus and branch.”
Adding a little more color to the enterprise results, Robbins called out some of Cisco’s network modernization offerings for customers. “We’ve got [our] routing refresh, we’ve got a lot of new technology in our data center networking business … we have Wi-Fi 7 gear, which grew triple digits year over year. We’re in year eight of the [Catalyst 9000] offering, and honestly, if you look at products that were pre-[Catalyst 9000] that are still installed in our customer base, there’s tens of billions of dollars of install base there that we can go after,” Robbins said.
Demand for AI infrastructure will extend to enterprises, Robbins said:
“If you think about the AI revolution…We tend to see these things begin first in the cloud providers, which we’re clearly seeing the AI play in the cloud providers. Then we see it shift into the enterprise. We see a shift in the back end, in this case, from the back end to the front end. We believe that will occur as enterprises start using more of these services, and then enterprises will also build out inferencing… and we’re even seeing the telco business actually pick up as they’re telling us they’re increasing their network capacity and they’re modernizing their infrastructure in preparation for AI. So, we think AI is going to drive network modernization across all of these segments.”
Taking aim at security
Overall security order growth in Q4 was up double digits, Robbins said. “We have 80 new Hypershield customers, largely connected to this new smart switch [the N9300 Smart Switch]. So that strategy is working. And I would say that we had 480-plus new SSE customers during the quarter. So that’s our secure services edge [which] is really getting good traction.
Robbins singled out the demand for integrated networking and security for agentic AI workloads, in particular.
“We’re going to have to put security into the fabric of the network, because agentic workflows [are] going to be in constant communication. Whether you think about general agents, or you think about robotics, … low-latency connectivity is going to be huge, and the security is going to be huge. And the only way to do both of those is to fuse security into the core of the network, so that’s our plan,” Robbins said.
In a chart accompanying Cisco’s earnings, the vendor stated: “As Agentic AI workloads rapidly expand, with AI agents being trained in data centers, deployed across application environments, and engaging continuously with end-users, network traffic will not only exceed today’s chatbot levels, but agents will keep it consistently high through their ongoing interactions. This fundamental shift will require networks to be upgraded, with security embedded deeply into the fabric of the network to safeguard every interaction.”
Strategic Nvidia alliance
There’s a lot going on with Cisco’s strategic partnership with Nvidia to deliver AI networking components, Robbins stated.
“Our expanding partnership with Nvidia also positions us to deliver on these new [AI] demands with completed integrations of Cisco Nexus switches with Nvidia Spectrum-X architecture, offering low latency, high speed networking for AI clusters,” Robbins said. The secure AI Factory co-developed AI infrastructure with security embedded across all layers is also being advanced, he added.
Robbins said customers have only seen the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to products so far, but that will change rapidly.
“We’ve got a lot of milestones that are going to be done in the next few months, and we think that as the enterprise really begins to ramp up, that partnership and our portfolio, we think, will be in good shape in fiscal year ’26 relative to AI,” he said.
Source:: Network World