Cisco’s AI Strategy Comes Into Focus
Cisco has been one of the constants of the technology industry for decades. Through routing, switching, voice over IP, cloud, security and now AI, the company has continued to maintain a central role in enterprise technology.
What became clearer at Cisco Live is that Cisco’s AI strategy is starting to look much bigger than infrastructure alone.
For several years, the pieces were visible. Silicon One. AI networking. Splunk. Security. Observability. Automation. Cloud Control. AgenticOps.
Individually, those moves made sense. Together, they now look like part of a connected platform strategy.
The larger story is that Cisco appears to be positioning itself around the operating layer enterprises will need to run, secure, observe and govern AI environments at scale. While much of the AI industry is focused on building bigger models, faster chips and more capable agents, Cisco is focused on the environment where enterprise AI actually has to operate.
That means networking. It means telemetry. It means security. It means governance. It means operational control across complex, multi-vendor environments.
That may not generate the same headlines as model benchmarks, but it could become one of the most important parts of the enterprise AI market.
Cloud Control is especially important in that context. Cisco could have described it as another dashboard or management console. Instead, the company is positioning it as an operating layer. That distinction matters because operating layers become the place where policies are enforced, workflows are coordinated and ecosystems begin to form.
The Splunk acquisition also looks more strategic through this lens. Observability is no longer just about monitoring infrastructure. In the AI era, telemetry becomes the context layer that operators, security teams and automated systems need to understand what is happening and respond appropriately.
AgenticOps adds another piece to the picture. As organizations deploy more AI agents, they will need ways to observe agent behavior, enforce policy, manage interactions and ensure automated actions remain aligned with business requirements.
Cisco’s bet is that enterprises will need more than AI infrastructure. They will need a way to operate AI safely and reliably in production.
The network is still the foundation.
But the operating layer may be the bigger opportunity.
The strategy is visible now. Execution is the next test.
Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome. " This week, I'm on the road again.
If you can't tell, I'm here in Las Vegas at Cisco Live. And I don't know how many of you have been to a Cisco Live. It's a really big show.
Really big show, as someone once said. But I've heard upwards of, I don't know, 20,000, 30,000 people maybe here. We're out on the floor and we're surrounded here by NVIDIA.
We're going to talk more about NVIDIA in a second. Nutanix, Forward, AMD, CDW, and of course, Cisco themselves. If in your job you haven't had a chance to go to a lot of industry conferences, I really recommend that even if you have to do it on your own dime to do, because for a couple of reasons.
Number one, it's the best way to really see what's going on in the industry. Number two, there is nothing like flesh to flesh, eye to eye contact with your peers for networking opportunities, learning, furthering your career. And number three, they're usually in decent places like Las Vegas.
I'm not a huge Vegas fan, to tell you the truth, but there's worse places to do conferences in. So what was the big news at Cisco Live this week? Well, I've written a bunch of articles on it.
ai, Textstrong IT, on Digital CXO for the most part, as well as Security Boulevard, because Cisco, in case you didn't know this, has always been one of the biggest security vendors in the world. No surprise, the big story this week was agentic. Agentic AI dominates every story or every show, it seems, and Cisco certainly had plenty of agentic news to talk about.
But before we get to agentics, I wanted to talk about silicon. Now, when I was coming up in the industry, silicon, semiconductors, hardware, it just wasn't sexy. It was plumbing.
But I wrote an article on Textstrong AI where plumbing is sexy again, right? Whether we're talking about the chips that run these GPUs and our AI factories, or the networking infrastructure that's going to be able to transport at scale the kind of information that this AI era demands of us, what worked five years ago is the same old. It's not going to work now.
And so to reach AI scale, you've got to use AI. And if I had to put my thumb on a theme of this whole Cisco Live, it's that Cisco is reinventing the infrastructure stack for an agentic AI era. And what they're doing really, and I wrote it in my article, is they want to be the operating system, the OS, the operating system for your agentic AI infrastructure.
And now that infrastructure's going to live in data centers. It's going to live on the edge. It's going to live right near your device.
You're only as good as your weakest or smallest pipe. Now Cisco being Cisco is doing this on an all-out front, right? First of all, they've invested in their own silicon.
They call it Cisco One Silicon. This was announced actually at Cisco Live in EMEA earlier this spring. But they continue to innovate.
Came out with the G-series chip this week, had something like a half a trillion transistors on it. Think about that. Let me roll that off your tongue again.
A half a trillion transistors on one chip. But you're going to need that kind of horsepower to have an AI infrastructure operating system. So while I'm on the subject of silicon, I don't know if you can tell, but to my right is a big booth from NVIDIA.
And I will tell you one thing about living in this AI world is we live in Pax NVIDIA. I don't remember the last show I went to where NVIDIA wasn't a major partner, a major draw, a major spotlight of the event. Now, Cisco Live is no exception.
They have several announcements with NVIDIA of a partnership, as well as there were, I think, two or three different exclusive session tracks around NVIDIA-Cisco's partnership. But that wasn't all Cisco did. They came out, well, obviously Splunk is part of Cisco.
They have put agentic AI squarely on the roadmap, squarely as an engine behind their new observability. They've come out with several different security announcements, some of them Mythos-enabled, if you will. They've actually fortified their own hardware and software solutions against vulnerabilities in Mythos, realizing that they're not going to be immune to this type of vulnerability finding that we're seeing all over the place.
Most of all, though, they've launched something they call Cisco Cloud Control. And again, this is designed from the ground up for agentic AI, and it's just really comprehensive is the best way I could tell you. It's a soup to nuts platform that grows every day because it's not just Cisco.
who are contributing solutions to cloud control. So again, Cisco leading the way here. I wanted to talk about something else, though.
I wrote several articles this week about the data center build-out in the US. I know we need these big data centers, but I don't know if you truly grasp the scale. Scale is a word I use a lot lately.
One article I wrote was based on a great article that I read, I believe, in Bloomberg, about the HyperON data center that Meta is building in a long-forgotten corner of Louisiana. I believe it's about 4,000 acres. But to get this data center built, it literally reached all the way up to the White House, to the House of Representatives, where the Speaker of the House is actually from Louisiana.
In getting it built, Meta was able to kill a bill before the Senate protecting kids from online activities because Meta was against the bill. This particular data center build-out is right out of a John Grisham novel involving state government, local government, federal government, and all to build a data center that, by 2035, is going to contribute all of 500 jobs. This is a $200 billion build-out for 500 jobs.
The data center gets an 80% property tax deduction, so they're only paying 20% of their property taxes, contributing 500 jobs, and they get whatever they want. Now, I know you could say, well, this is in some forgotten corner of Louisiana, what do you expect? But there's a lot of forgotten places in this country, whether they're in Wyoming or Utah or Ohio or Georgia or Alabama.
Our rural areas are hungry for anything. And though this may not be the best deal in town, when it's the only deal in town, they don't have much of a choice. So yeah, all you folks up in northern Virginia or the New York area or Boston or urban areas, we could be NIMBYs about putting data centers into our neighborhoods, and for good reason.
But when you're in a forgotten part of this country, it's almost like winning the lottery because at least the temporary construction jobs will bring some money in locally. Now, but these data centers present other problems. This data center in Louisiana is going to use enough electricity to power all of the houses and all of the electricity needs of New York City for a day and a half.
So one data center consumes the electricity that New York City would use in a day and a half. Another article I wrote about the even bigger data center they're building in Utah will use enough electricity in one day than the whole state of Utah uses in a year. On top of that, the water needs of these data centers are tremendous.
Utah already has water problems. Where is that water coming from? At least in Louisiana, they're going to be taking the aquifer.
That means they're draining the swamp to power or to cool the data centers. But to me, data centers just being a technology solution, this is akin to the Eisenhower Highway plan or to any huge public works plan that is fundamentally changing the very nature of our environment, of our country. And I think it's something that we need to be looking into.
We're talking about spending trillions of dollars. We need to look into this closer. We need to make sure that people in forgotten corners of the country are not being taken advantage of.
It may be it's the right thing to put the data center there, but we need to have a good look at it. Anyway, I've got to do some more videos here at Cisco Live. Look for my coverage on any of our sites.
com. We launched it. Go check it out.
But until next week, this is Shimi. I'm out
