Cisco and NVIDIA Expand Partnership to Advance Enterprise AI Solutions

Cisco is expanding its partnership with NVIDIA to provide AI technology solutions to enterprises, aiming to give organizations flexibility and choice as they look to meet the demand of AI workloads for high-performance, low-latency, highly power-efficient connectivity within—and between—data centers, clouds, and users.

The NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform based on Cisco and NVIDIA silicon will form the foundation for many enterprise AI workloads.

By enabling interoperability between both companies’ networking architectures, the two companies are prioritizing customers’ needs for simplified, full-stack solutions.

According to the vendors, the goal of the expanded partnership is to allow customers to optimize their AI infrastructure investments with a common architecture, using their existing management tools and processes, spanning front and back-end networks.

“Enterprises are under immense pressure to deploy AI quickly and effectively, and many leaders struggle to justify the investment while balancing the risks,” said Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO, Cisco. “Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are partnering to remove barriers for customers and ensure they can optimize their infrastructure investments to unlock the power of AI.”

By making it easier to integrate and standardize on both Cisco and NVIDIA technology, customers will benefit from current and future technology advancements in the NVIDIA Spectrum-X platform such as adaptive routing, telemetry, congestion control, and low latency, as well as Cisco's broader networking, security, and digital resilience portfolio, including the Splunk data platform. As businesses develop AI capabilities and train models on their own data, having a comprehensive security strategy becomes crucial.

“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionize every industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Spectrum-X is Ethernet enhanced and supercharged for AI. Together with Cisco’s enterprise platforms and global reach, we can help companies worldwide build state-of-the-art NVIDIA infrastructure as they race to transform with AI.”

Focusing on simplifying deployment and operations, while improving workload performance and visibility, the objective of this deeper partnership is to deliver the highest performance Ethernet solutions available for AI workloads and extend NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X architecture to include Cisco Silicon One, making Cisco the only partner silicon supported in Spectrum-X Ethernet solutions.

In addition, the expanded partnership will help move enterprise data center Ethernet AI projects from prototype to full deployment, which would otherwise be limited to public cloud or SaaS services.

Cisco plans to enhance its Silicon switches to be compatible with Spectrum-X and NVIDIA’s reference architectures.

These updates will be available in the middle of calendar year 2025, including existing and upcoming Cisco Nexus, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, and Cisco UCS products. The timeline for new Cisco Spectrum switches will be announced later.

For more information about this news, visit www.cisco.com or www.nvidia.com.