Cisco Expands Partnership with NVIDIA to Boost AI Adoption

Global technology giant Cisco recently announced that it would expand its partnership with NVIDIA to provide AI solutions to enterprises, accelerating AI adoption.

Partnership focuses on AI workload demands

Through this expanded partnership, Cisco and NVIDIA aim to give organizations flexibility and choice as those organizations seek to meet the demand of AI workloads for high-performance, low latency, highly power-efficient connectivity in data centers, clouds, and users.

“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionize every industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of 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 NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking platform was built to deliver high-performance AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, along with diverse industry applications. 

The key benefits of the platform include:

• Bandwidth at scale
• Low latency 
• End-to-end stack optimization
• Advanced RoCE extensions for scalable AI communications
• Deterministic performance and performance isolation
• Open network operating system: SONiC and NVIDIA Cumulus

The NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform– based on Cisco and NVIDIA silicon– will form the foundation for enterprise AI workloads. Cisco and NVIDIA are prioritizing customers’ needs for simplified, full-stack solutions through this expanded partnership by enabling interoperability between both companies’ networking architectures.

The companies say the expanded partnership aims to allow customers to optimize their AI infrastructure investments with a common architecture, using their existing management tools and processes and 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, 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.”

Joint solutions through the expanded partnership

The two companies are focused on simplifying deployment and operations while improving workload performance and visibility to accelerate AI adoption. This deeper partnership aims 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.

Further, the partnership will help move enterprise data center Ethernet AI projects from prototype to full deployment.

Among the new joint solutions that Cisco and NVIDIA are planning to develop for customers include:

• Developing data center switches with the NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet platform. According to Cisco, the open ecosystem approach will give customers greater flexibility and more choices. On the NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking platform, organizations can standardize on it with both Cisco and NVIDIA switch silicon-based architectures, thus bringing the technologies from both companies under a single management fabric.
• NVIDIA and Cisco will collaborate to create and validate NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) and Enterprise Reference Architectures based on NVIDIA Spectrum-X with Cisco Silicon One, Hyperfabric, Nexus, UCS Compute, Optics, among other Cisco technologies.
• Jointly developing and delivering high-performing Ethernet solutions for customers and planning for continued collaboration to address significant challenges like congestion management and load balancing so customers can scale and secure AI deployments.

“World Wide Technology’s long-standing partnerships with Cisco and NVIDIA has already resulted in cutting-edge AI solutions that drive innovation and business transformation,” said Jim Kavanaugh, Co-Founder and CEO, World Wide Technology. “By leveraging the strengths of Cisco’s deep expertise in the data center and NVIDIA’s advanced AI technologies, we are poised to deliver unparalleled value to our customers and help them navigate the complexities of AI adoption with confidence.”

Cisco will enhance its silicon switches to be compatible with Spectrum-X and NVIDIA’s architectures and make them available in the middle of the 2025 calendar year, including existing and upcoming Cisco Nexus, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, and Cisco UCS products.

Cisco has committed itself to helping organizations adopt AI and support AI-related traffic. Read more about Cisco’s newly launched AI infrastructure and data center solutions.