Cisco pushes frontier of AI-native infrastructure

Cisco will unveil its latest innovations at GITEX GLOBAL 2025 in Dubai, aiming to equip enterprises across the Middle East and broader region with infrastructure built specifically for the AI era. The showcase focuses on AI-ready data centres, resilient network architectures, and strengthened security frameworks designed to support advanced workloads in data-intensive environments.

By joining the AI Infrastructure Partnership alongside BlackRock, Microsoft, NVIDIA, xAI and others, Cisco has committed to accelerating capital flows into datacentre and infrastructure projects. The partnership expects to unlock $30 billion in initial funding, scaling up to $100 billion including debt financing. Cisco brings its network, security and systems expertise to support the platform’s mission of secure, at-scale AI infrastructure.

At the heart of Cisco’s push is its new Cisco Data Fabric, launched in integration with Splunk, which provides federated data access across systems such as Amazon S3, Iceberg, Delta Lake and Snowflake, routing workloads intelligently to the best analytics or storage engine. This architecture is intended to reduce data movement, shorten analysis latency, and enable enterprises to transform machine data into AI-ready intelligence.

To support retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI deployments, Cisco introduced the Secure AI Factory solution with NVIDIA and VAST Data. This validated architecture accelerates data extraction and retrieval at scale while enforcing security guardrails for every token processed. AI PODs built under this architecture offer pre-validated, high-performance building blocks for enterprise AI.

Networking and security are being redefined for the AI workload environment. At Cisco Live 2025, the company launched a next-generation network architecture for campus, branch and industrial environments, delivering unified management and devices purpose-built to support AI traffic patterns. It also introduced Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal Zero Trust Network Access to embed security into network fabric across hybrid and distributed environments. These features aim to simplify policy enforcement, improve visibility, and reduce complexity in securing both human users and AI agents.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins disclosed that fiscal year 2025 saw record AI infrastructure orders. In its final quarter, the company secured over $800 million from webscale clients, bringing total AI-focused orders to more than $2 billion—more than double its initial target. He described the pipeline as steadily growing into “hundreds of millions” as enterprises demand scalable, secure solutions.

In the Middle East, Cisco plans to demonstrate the regional relevance of its technologies under the theme “Make AI Work for You.” According to Cisco’s new AI Readiness Index, a vast majority of organisations in the UAE expect to expand their data centre capacity for AI within five years. The company will also present its work with Splunk on security and observability platforms at the event.

Cisco’s collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN is intended to build out an open, scalable AI infrastructure ecosystem aligned with Vision 2030. The multi-year programme includes deployment of cloud-based AI infrastructure, joint research initiatives, and efforts to grow local talent and innovation. The partnership underscores Saudi ambitions to position itself as a global AI hub.

Cisco sees accelerating demand for network modernisation. Its internal research reports that 97 percent of IT leaders view modernised networks as critical to deploying AI, cloud and IoT workloads, and 98 percent rate secure networking as essential for growth. However, the same study notes that only 40 percent of organisations have begun deploying advanced segmentation or intelligent control, illustrating an execution gap.

To strengthen its AI strategy, Cisco also expanded its presence in Indonesia by signing a Letter of Intent with BRIN to develop AI and cybersecurity capabilities via its Country Digital Acceleration programme. The plan includes building an AI Centre of Excellence and delivering training in AI, security and networking to 500,000 Indonesians by 2030.

Splunk’s observability portfolio itself is being reworked to embrace agentic AI, deploying AI agents to automate tasks such as root cause detection, alert correlation and issue resolution. This is intended to lighten the operational burden on IT and engineering teams while driving real-time insight.