Cisco to Deliver Secure AI Infrastructure with NVIDIA

Rhea-AI Summary

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to develop the Cisco Secure AI Factory, a comprehensive AI infrastructure solution focused on security. The partnership aims to simplify enterprise AI deployment while ensuring robust protection at all levels.

The solution combines Cisco's networking and security expertise with NVIDIA's AI capabilities, featuring components such as:

• Cisco UCS AI servers with NVIDIA HGX and MGX
• Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI and networking solutions
• High-performance storage from certified partners
• NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform

Security is embedded throughout the architecture using:

• Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall for unified security management
• Cisco Hypershield for workload protection
• Cisco AI Defense for AI application security

The solution will be available for purchase before the end of 2025, offering both ready-to-deploy and build-your-own options.

Positive

• Strategic partnership with industry leader NVIDIA strengthens Cisco's position in AI infrastructure
• Comprehensive security integration across all layers of AI infrastructure
• Multiple deployment options provide flexibility for enterprise customers
• Partnership with established storage providers ensures complete solution offering

Negative

• Product won't be available until end of 2025, potentially losing market share to competitors
• Success depends on effective integration of multiple complex systems and partners

Insights

Technology Investment Analyst

Cisco's announcement of the Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA represents a strategic positioning in the high-growth AI infrastructure market. This partnership delivers a comprehensive secure AI factory architecture that addresses two critical enterprise challenges simultaneously: deploying high-performance AI infrastructure and ensuring robust security throughout the AI stack.

The partnership intelligently leverages both companies' core strengths - Cisco's networking prowess and security expertise combined with NVIDIA's AI compute leadership. By embedding security at all layers (infrastructure, workload, and application), Cisco is differentiating its AI offerings in a crowded market where security concerns often impede enterprise AI adoption.

What's particularly valuable is how this solution builds upon existing technologies like Cisco Hypershield, Hybrid Mesh Firewall, and AI Defense, creating an integrated security framework specifically designed for AI workloads. The flexible deployment options (ready-to-deploy or build-your-own) demonstrate Cisco's understanding that enterprises are at different stages of their AI journey.

While full availability isn't expected until late 2025, many components are available today, allowing Cisco to begin capturing revenue from this partnership immediately. The validated reference architectures announced today indicate the companies are executing rapidly on their February partnership announcement.

For Cisco investors, this represents a meaningful expansion into the AI infrastructure market, potentially creating a new growth vector beyond their traditional networking business while reinforcing their security portfolio with AI-specific capabilities.

Enterprise Technology Strategist

Cisco's partnership with NVIDIA addresses a critical market gap in enterprise AI adoption - the complex integration of secure infrastructure with high-performance computing. The Secure AI Factory architecture is significant because it creates a comprehensive solution stack that spans compute, networking, storage, and security rather than forcing enterprises to cobble together disparate components.

What makes this offering compelling is its focus on security-by-design throughout the AI lifecycle. The integration of Cisco's Hypershield and AI Defense products with NVIDIA's hardware creates multiple security layers: infrastructure protection via Hybrid Mesh Firewall, workload security through Hypershield's runtime protection, and application-level safeguards with AI Defense's vulnerability testing.

The partnership's technical architecture intelligently leverages NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs for hardware-accelerated security, which should provide performance advantages over software-only security solutions. This addresses the complexity challenge enterprises face when trying to secure AI workloads without sacrificing computational performance.

The flexibility in deployment models is strategically important - providing both turnkey solutions and customizable components accommodates varying enterprise maturity levels. Cisco's inclusion of storage partners (Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, and VAST Data) creates a complete ecosystem play rather than a proprietary stack.

By solving both the AI infrastructure scaling challenge and the security requirements simultaneously, Cisco has positioned itself to capture significant enterprise AI spending as organizations move from experimentation to production AI deployments.

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA breaks new ground in AI infrastructure and security while accelerating and simplifying enterprise AI adoption

News Summary:

• Offering will empower customers to build and secure data centers to develop and run AI workloads.
• The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA will embed security within all layers, from the application, to the workload, to the infrastructure using solutions like Cisco AI Defense and Hybrid Mesh Firewall.

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- GTC -- Cisco [NASDAQ: CSCO] today unveiled an AI factory architecture with NVIDIA that puts security at its core. This collaboration with NVIDIA builds on the expanded partnership that was announced last month, and the companies have moved swiftly to provide validated reference architectures today. Together, the companies are developing the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to dramatically simplify how enterprises deploy, manage, and secure AI infrastructure at any scale.

"AI can unlock groundbreaking opportunities for the enterprise," said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO, Cisco. "To achieve this, the integration of networking and security is essential. Cisco and NVIDIA's trusted, innovative solutions empower our customers to harness AI's full potential simply and securely."

"AI factories are transforming every industry, and security must be built into every layer to protect data, applications and infrastructure," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. "Together, NVIDIA and Cisco are creating the blueprint for secure AI—giving enterprises the foundation they need to confidently scale AI while safeguarding their most valuable assets."

Developing and delivering AI applications require high performing, scalable infrastructure and AI software tool chain. Securing this infrastructure and AI software requires a new architecture – one that embeds security at all layers of the AI stack and automatically expands and adapts as the underlying infrastructure changes. Cisco and NVIDIA's partnership on the NVIDIA Spectrum-X^TM Ethernet networking platform provides the foundation for the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. Cisco is integrating security solutions like Cisco Hypershield, to help protect AI workloads, and Cisco AI Defense, to help protect the development, deployment, and use of AI models and applications. Together, Cisco and NVIDIA will provide customers with the flexibility to design infrastructure for their specific AI needs without sacrificing operational simplicity or security.

Building a Secure AI Factory
AI factories – data centers purpose-built to power AI workloads – are designed to be more modular, scalable and agile, but organizations must also look beyond raw compute power. AI Factories must address new and complex security challenges. The recently published Cisco State of AI Security report analyzes dozens of AI-specific threat vectors and over 700 pieces of AI-related legislation to highlight key developments from a rapidly evolving AI security landscape. Organizations that strategically address both their AI infrastructure and security challenges simultaneously will be more agile, scale faster, and derive business value quicker.

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is expected to build on the companies' unique ability to offer flexible AI networking and full-stack technology options that leverage the planned joint architecture. The partnership will bring together technologies from Cisco, NVIDIA, and our ecosystem partners into a secure AI factory architecture for enterprise customers, including:  

• Compute: Cisco UCS AI servers based on NVIDIA HGX and NVIDIA MGX for accelerated computing.
• Networking: Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI and Nexus networking solutions, powered by Silicon One and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking.
• Storage: High-performance storage from certified partners Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, and VAST Data.
• Software: NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform to streamline the development and deployment of production-grade agentic AI workloads.

The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA includes security at all layers:

• Securing the infrastructure: Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall provides unified security management and consistent policy across multiple enforcement points, including network switches, traditional firewalls, and workload agents. This integrated approach ensures pervasive and consistent security, ranging from deep packet inspection to wide infrastructure coverage, detecting, blocking and containing adversaries. Cisco Hypershield (part of Hybrid Mesh Firewall) will, in the future, extend pervasive, zero-trust security enforcement to every AI node by integrating with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs.
• Securing the Workload: Cisco Hypershield prevents adversary lateral movement and proactive vulnerability mitigation without the need for patching, all from a single management interface. By monitoring and controlling process executions, file access, and network activities, Hypershield delivers deep visibility and surgical runtime enforcement within AI workloads. Future enhancements will further strengthen workload protection through integration with NVIDIA BlueField-3's DOCA AppShield for real-time workload threat detection in AI-focused virtual machines and containers.
• Securing the AI application: Cisco AI Defense empowers security and AI teams with comprehensive tools to protect AI applications from safety (e.g. off-policy, toxic behavior) and security (i.e. prompt injection, data privacy) risks across the development lifecycle. AI Defense integrates into existing CI/CD workflows to provide automated vulnerability testing and a common layer of runtime security across any number of models and applications. Additionally, AI Defense helps companies align to AI security standards with a single integration, including NIST, MITRE ATLAS, and OWASP LLM Top 10. Future enhancements include integration with NVIDIA AI Enterprise to streamline AI security workflows.

Cisco and NVIDIA each bring a unique understanding of customer AI infrastructure needs, and by combining their insights, can offer flexible deployment models alongside proven reference architectures. The Secure AI Factory will provide enterprise customers with scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure that supports customers at any stage of their journey and embeds security throughout.

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA will have flexible deployment options, including:

• Ready-to-deploy: Utilizing Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI along with Cisco's security portfolio and NVIDIA technology, customers can deploy a vertically integrated AI solution that automates and simplifies the secure AI factory lifecycle from design to deployment and ongoing monitoring.
• Build-your-own: Featuring customizable modular components from Cisco, NVIDIA, and the companies' storage ecosystem partners, customers can incorporate their current infrastructure and build solutions that are designed precisely for their unique environments.

"In today's fast-moving market, businesses need more than just technology—they need end-to-end solutions that address their most pressing challenges. I see Cisco and NVIDIA combining their strengths to deliver integrated solutions that I believe will drive innovation, simplify deployment, and streamline operations," said Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. "AI isn't easy but the combination of the two could be an 'easy button' for AI infrastructure. By making AI infrastructure easier to adopt and manage, they could empower enterprises to accelerate digital transformation and achieve their strategic goals with more confidence."

Cisco and NVIDIA: The journey to a validated and unified architecture
Moving quickly is crucial to meet today's demand for AI infrastructure, and Cisco and NVIDIA have made progress as part of the collaboration announced in February 2025. Cisco has developed new reference architectures with deployment options for Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI or Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches validated and based on the NVIDIA Enterprise Reference Architecture for HGX H200 and Spectrum-X.

AVAILABILITY
Solutions based on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA architecture are expected to be available for purchase before the end of calendar year 2025. Many of the individual technology components included in the architecture are available today.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Executive Blog Post: Embracing the AI Era: Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, Jeetu Patel, Cisco's Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer
• For more information on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, click here.

ABOUT CISCO
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience.  With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word 'partner' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

Products and features described in this release that are not currently available remain in varying stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The delivery timeline of any future products and features is subject to change at the discretion of Cisco and its partners.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cisco-to-deliver-secure-ai-infrastructure-with-nvidia-302404977.html

SOURCE Cisco Systems, Inc.

FAQ

When will Cisco's Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA be available for purchase?

The solution is expected to be available for purchase before the end of calendar year 2025.

What security components are included in CSCO's AI Factory solution?

It includes Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, Cisco Hypershield for workload protection, and Cisco AI Defense for AI application security.

What deployment options does Cisco (CSCO) offer for the Secure AI Factory?

Two options: ready-to-deploy using Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI, and build-your-own with customizable modular components.

Which storage partners are certified for Cisco's AI Factory solution?

Pure Storage, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, and VAST Data are the certified storage partners.

How does CSCO's AI Factory integrate with NVIDIA technology?

It uses NVIDIA HGX and MGX for servers, Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform.