Cisco is strengthening its portfolio for the AI powered enterprise and AI enabled organisations in 2026 and beyond. With enterprises rapidly embracing Generative and Agentic AI, whether in pilot phase or embedded in selected areas, AI agents are starting to work 24/7, demanding low latency and greater storage capacity.
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco Systems, recently spoke at the Cisco AI Summit, held in February in San Francisco and online, of the issues organisations globally are facing when it comes to embracing and embedding AI (artificial intelligence) into systems, processes and workflows.
Robbins commented:
“There are lots of questions and discussions about what does it mean to your enterprise infrastructure, what does it mean to your security posture? What does it mean to application development cycles? All those things are really important.”
Plethora of AI Projects and AI People
Robbins was addressing the Chief AI Officers (CAIO), the VP’s of AI and the MLOps Engineers who are increasingly setting up AI Centres of Excellence, or AI Councils, in their own organisations, those teams that bring together technical, legal, HR, and business leaders to manage AI’s impact across the organisation. All major companies have one, and what they’re really thinking about now is future proofing organisation infrastructure, as 24/7 AI agents require little to no downtime, and they often work at a sustained, high-capacity pace. And so do their nemeses in cybersecurity, whether they attack, or are counterparts that defend.
Cisco Live Conference 2026
At the recent Cisco Live conference held in Amsterdam, 9 to 11 February 2026, the Cisco teams were showcasing their latest innovation to 21,000 IT professionals responsible for embedding AI into their organisations in its various shapes and forms.
First up, at the centre of it all, is the miraculous Silicon One G300. It will be powering the new Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000. Nexus One now delivers a unified management plane and the 1.6T OSFP (Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable) Optics delivers ultra-high bandwidth connectivity targeting AI scale out solutions for 1.6T switch to NIC links and 1.6T, 800G, 400G, or 200G switch to server links, offering customers high performance and reliability.
AI innovation is moving faster than ever before
Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Cisco, commented:
“AI innovation is moving faster than ever before and we’re delivering the critical infrastructure our customers need to move fast and adopt AI safely and securely.”
At the heart of all Cisco innovation is a desire to answer infrastructure constraints being caused, and to be caused, in 2026 and beyond, always ensuring guardrails such as constant monitoring and protection is in place.
Silicon One G300
The new Silicon One G300 is a 102.4 Tbps switching silicon that sets a new standard for AI backend networking. It is designed to power massive, distributed AI clusters with high performance, security, and reliability.
The G300 uniquely offers what Cisco term ‘Intelligent Collective Networking’, which combines a fully shared packet buffer, path-based load balancing, and proactive network telemetry to offer improved performance and profitability for large-scale data centres. It is programmable for new network configurations even after it has been deployed, can speedily react to irregular heavy peaks in traffic, respond fast to link failures, and prevent packet drops that can stall jobs.
Next Gen Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000
Cisco is introducing the next generation of Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 fixed and modular Ethernet systems, powered by Silicon One, and designed for the extreme power and thermal demands of AI workloads. The new 102.4T systems offer the option of liquid-cooled or air-cooled designs.
The 100% liquid cooled systems enable significantly higher bandwidth density, offering the same bandwidth in a single system that would previously have required 6 prior (51.2T) generation systems. The 1.6T OSFP (Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable) optics deliver ultra-high bandwidth connectivity.
Cisco has introduced new 28.8T modular line cards, enabling a wide range of customers to deploy a common architecture across multiple roles in their network.
Cisco Nexus One
AI organisations are constantly expressing a need for greater flexibility in where and how they run AI workloads. To address the diverse requirements of these environments, Cisco is advancing Nexus One with a unified management plane that brings together silicon, systems, optics, software, and programmable intelligence as a single integrated solution, with improvements to make it easier to troubleshoot through guided, human-in-the-loop conversations that turn complex issues into actionable resolutions.
Investing for Now and In the Future
All MSPs and resellers, in the first instance, should talk to their Cisco representative or authorised Cisco distributor. Whether clients, partners or customers are planning for the future, or they are facing current legacy infrastructure that requires an immediate solution, a well planned execution of data storage solutions, and the interoperability of systems and devices, can make the difference between long term failure or success. Plus, it will keep the network administrators and security specialists happy too.
