Q&A with Cisco President and CPO Jeetu Patel on its multibillion-dollar networking deals for AI infrastructure, competition from partners like Nvidia, and more
The president of the dotcom-era darling discusses the company's strong conviction around AI and some of the technology's risks
Context & Ripple Effects
Cisco’s AI-infrastructure push has been building since its 2024 Nexus HyperFabric partnership with Nvidia and $1 billion AI investment fund. In April, CEO Chuck Robbins was still framing networking, data-center buildouts and memory constraints as central to Cisco’s AI strategy.
The multibillion-dollar networking deals give that strategy commercial weight, while Cisco’s relationship with Nvidia is increasingly both collaborative and competitive. The pressure is not limited to established suppliers: Upscale’s $190 million financing shows investors are backing a networking challenger aimed at Cisco.
First-order effects
- Cisco’s large AI-networking contracts make enterprise and data-center buyers more consequential customers for its networking business, while placing Cisco in direct competitive overlap with Nvidia.
- Cisco must preserve its Nvidia partnership while differentiating its own networking offer to customers buying AI infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- Nvidia faces a partner that is also competing for networking spend, pushing both companies to make their AI-infrastructure bundles more distinct to shared customers.
- Upscale and other networking challengers must show that their offerings can compete for the same AI-buildout budgets now being validated by Cisco’s large deals.
Third-order effects
- If AI buyers continue to treat networking as a core part of the infrastructure purchase, competition will move beyond accelerators toward more integrated AI stacks spanning compute, networking and services.
- The Cisco-Nvidia relationship points to a market in which suppliers increasingly cooperate to win deployments while competing for control of the same infrastructure budget.
The trend: AI infrastructure is broadening from an accelerator-led purchase into a contest over the integrated compute, networking and services stack.