Cisco announced a major expansion of its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, strengthening its AI factory strategy for enterprises. The move provides a unified framework to deploy AI across infrastructure, from central data centers to local edge sites where data is generated and decisions are made.

The AI factory approach enables enterprises, neoclouds, sovereign clouds, and service providers to scale AI from pilot projects to full production. As a result, organizations can avoid integrating disconnected systems. In addition, deployment timelines can be reduced from months to weeks, while security is embedded from the beginning.

According to Cisco Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins, many organizations recognize AI’s potential but still face challenges in deploying it safely and at scale. Through its partnership with NVIDIA, Cisco aims to address these challenges by delivering an architecture designed to simplify deployment, operation, and security of AI infrastructure.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang highlighted that AI factories are reshaping industries. He emphasized that security must be integrated at every layer, from silicon to software, to protect data, applications, and infrastructure. Together, both companies are building a secure foundation for AI infrastructure from core to edge, enabling organizations to scale intelligence with confidence.

The expansion also focuses on enabling AI to run wherever data resides. AI inference is increasingly required at the edge, such as in hospitals or manufacturing environments, where real-time decisions are critical. This shift requires infrastructure that supports local processing closer to devices and data sources.

To support edge inferencing use cases, Cisco is enhancing its enterprise edge portfolio. It now supports NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs across Cisco UCS and Cisco Unified Edge platforms. This allows enterprises to run mission-critical AI workloads at the edge without relying on large data center-scale hardware, reducing both energy usage and physical footprint.

Cisco is also improving performance and simplifying large-scale AI infrastructure deployment. Its latest high-speed switches are designed for demanding AI workloads. These include the 102.4Tbps Cisco N9100 powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-6 Ethernet switch silicon, alongside the already available 800G N9100 powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet silicon.

In addition, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, now part of Cisco Nexus One, will support Cisco N9000 Series switches, including the N9100 Series powered by NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon. This approach helps organizations shift from complex multi-vendor setups to a streamlined full-stack solution, reducing integration complexity and shortening deployment cycles.

Security remains a central component of the Secure AI Factory strategy. With AI models becoming high-value assets and autonomous agents performing actions and decisions, Cisco emphasizes that security cannot be an afterthought. The company is embedding protection across all layers to defend against external threats and unauthorized agent behavior.

Cisco is also strengthening its AI agent security capabilities. Cisco AI Defense will support NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtimes, part of the NVIDIA Agent Toolkit. This integration introduces controls and guardrails to govern agent actions and improve oversight of AI-driven processes.

Overall, the collaboration between Cisco and NVIDIA aims to deliver a unified, secure, and scalable environment for enterprises to build and deploy AI across core data centers and edge environments. The continued expansion of the AI factory ecosystem reflects growing demand for integrated, high-performance, and secure AI infrastructure built around the AI factory model.

Related post

View all