The deal aims to provide organizations with greater flexibility and choice in managing AI workloads
Cisco has announced an expanded collaboration with Nvidia with the aim of delivering artificial intelligence (AI) technology solutions for the enterprise.
While businesses recognize AI’s importance for growth, many are still in the early stages of implementation due to the technical complexities and security challenges of running AI-ready data centers, Cisco said in a release.
The networking firm noted that this agreement with Nvidia seeks to provide organizations with greater flexibility and choice in managing AI workloads that require high-performance, low-latency and energy-efficient connectivity across data centers, cloud environments and users.
Cisco also highlighted that at the core of this collaboration is the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, which integrates Cisco and Nvidia silicon to support enterprise AI workloads. By ensuring interoperability between both companies’ networking architectures, the partnership will simplify AI infrastructure deployment and allow organizations to optimize their investments using existing management tools and processes across front-end and back-end networks, it added.
“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 of 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.”
“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionize every industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO at 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.”
The integration of Cisco and Nvidia technologies will allow customers to benefit from advancements in the Nvidia Spectrum-X platform, such as adaptive routing, telemetry, congestion control and low latency, along with Cisco’s networking, security and digital portfolio, including the Splunk data platform.
Under this partnership, Cisco will develop data center switches that integrate with the Nvidia Spectrum Ethernet platform. Also, organizations will be able to standardize on Nvidia Spectrum-X networking using both Cisco and Nvidia silicon-based architectures within a single management framework.
The two partners will continue to work together to tackle key challenges, including congestion management and load balancing, to help customers scale and secure AI deployments.
Cisco also said it plans to enhance its silicon switches to ensure compatibility with Spectrum-X and Nvidia’s reference architectures. These updates are expected to roll out by mid-2025 and will apply to existing and upcoming Cisco Nexus, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric and Cisco UCS products.
A new survey recently published by Nvidia reveals that telcos are leaning into AI, and even generative AI (gen AI), quite aggressively, going against the industry’s reputation for being slower to adopt new technologies. Of the telecommunications professionals surveyed by Nvidia, 97% stated that their company is either actively deploying or assessing deploying AI in their operations, with 80% of respondents saying they believe AI to be crucial for their company’s future success, and two-thirds planning to increase spending on AI infrastructure this year. Top areas of AI investment include improving network planning and operations (37%) and in using AI for field-operations optimization (33%).
