NVIDIA Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to the enterprise with a massive infrastructure partnership against multiple projects prompted by world leaders scrambling to gain a competitive edge.
Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is designed to break new ground and help enterprises easily build and secure data centers to develop and run AI workloads.
The accord, announced last week at NVIDIA’s annual GTC AI conference in San Jose, Calif., will bring much-needed new AI infrastructure, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC. AI, he said, “reinvented the entire computing stack, from compute, networking, storage, the operating system and the way you develop the applications on top.”
“We need to go and rerack the whole world’s companies,” Huang said.
The Secure AI Factory project integrates Cisco’s Hypershield — which uses AI to dynamically refine security policies based on application identity and behavior — and AI Defense packages to protect the development, deployment and use of AI models and applications, according to Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer at Cisco.
“Whether you’re at the beginning of your AI journey or looking to scale existing infrastructure, Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia will provide scalable, high-performance solutions that adapt to your unique requirements,” Patel said in a blog post. “With customizable modular components and proven reference architectures, we intend to empower you to design and deploy AI infrastructure that aligns seamlessly with your business goals.”
The NVIDIA-Cisco announcement comes against a backdrop of political and economic maneuvering by world leaders to lead the way in AI development within their borders — particularly with data centers to produce the vast amounts of energy necessary to power AI.
While Wall Street frets over President Donald Trump’s threat to levy tariffs that could upend semiconductor imports that large tech companies heavily lean on, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told CNBC that the Trump administration wants the U.S. to maintain its lead in AI.
“Based on the conversations I’ve had with the administration…they want to protect that lead, and they want us to win,” Robbins said. “I believe that their policies that they’re going to implement will, will ensure that that happens.”
The Cisco-NVIDIA partnership, which builds on a joint development agreement in February to bring Ethernet-based networking offerings for AI data centers, is the latest major initiative to bring AI data centers and infrastructure projects to the U.S.
In recent months, projects from OpenAI-Oracle-SoftBank (the $500 billion Stargate), Microsoft-NVIDIA-xAI (the $30 billion AI Infrastructure Partnership), as well as solo efforts from Apple Inc. ($500 billion), Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and others have vowed to pump resources into AI — with notable prodding from the Trump Administration.
