Cisco

Cisco Systems, Inc. is the world''s largest networking-equipment company, founded in 1984 by Stanford computer scientists Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner and headquartered in San Jose, California. Under CEO Chuck Robbins (since 2015), Cisco sells the routers, switches, security, and collaboration products that move much of the world''s internet traffic — and across fiscal 2026 it has repositioned itself as one of the central "picks and shovels" suppliers of the AI infrastructure buildout. With annual revenue around $54 billion and roughly 90,000 employees, Cisco sits at the intersection of two AI markets at once: the networks and silicon that AI data centers are built on, and the security layer that protects AI systems and the enterprises deploying them.

Cisco''s AI-security portfolio is anchored by two products. AI Defense is a platform for securing the AI applications, models, and agents that enterprises build and run — it red-teams models before deployment, embeds runtime guardrails, scans model repositories and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for poisoned data and malicious tools, and inspects agentic traffic in real time for threats like memory poisoning, tool misuse, and intent hijacking. Hypershield is a distributed, AI-native data-center security architecture that pushes enforcement directly into the Linux kernel (via eBPF and Cisco''s 2024 acquisition of Isovalent) and into the network fabric through programmable switches — with an Autonomous Segmentation engine that learns application behavior and a self-qualifying-updates capability that tests policy changes against a digital twin before applying them. Both build on Cisco''s broader security franchise, which also includes the $28 billion Splunk acquisition (observability and security analytics) and the AI Assistant for Security.

On the infrastructure side, Cisco is supplying the networking backbone for mass-scale AI clusters. Its Silicon One family of unified networking chips — including the G300 for scale-out and the P200 for scale-across — powers the Cisco 8000 Series and N9100 and N9300 data-center switches, designed to connect AI accelerators inside a rack (scale-up), across rows of racks (scale-out), and between data centers separated by hundreds of kilometers (scale-across). The Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, announced at GTC 2026, packages Cisco networking, security, and NVIDIA accelerated computing into a validated reference design that enterprises can deploy as a unit, and supports NVIDIA Spectrum-class Ethernet silicon alongside Cisco''s own.

Cisco''s AI business has become a material growth driver. The company reported $5.3 billion in AI infrastructure and hyperscaler orders year-to-date in fiscal 2026 and raised its full-year order target to $9 billion, up from an earlier $5 billion, with expected AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers near $4 billion. The momentum reflects a structural thesis CEO Chuck Robbins has pressed publicly: that the AI era forces a multi-year rebuild of data-center networking, security, and power infrastructure — and that Cisco''s combination of merchant silicon, switching, kernel-level security, and the Splunk analytics layer positions it to capture a meaningful share of that rebuild. Webex AI collaboration tools and an AI Assistant spanning Cisco''s product lines round out a portfolio that touches the enterprise from the silicon up to the meeting room.