Cisco financials catch AI demand, enterprise networking growth

Second, AI inference and enterprise clouds. “Our Nexus switches, Nvidia-based AI servers, AI Pods, and Hyperfabric and AI Defense software are designed to simplify and de-risk AI infrastructure deployment and bring the power of open, hyperscale AI networking to the enterprise,” Robbins said.

And third, AI network connectivity. “Customers are leveraging our technology platforms across switching, routing, security and observability to modernize, secure, and  automate their network operations to prepare for pervasive deployment of AI applications,” Robbins said.  “This, combined with mature back-end models will lead to increased capacity requirements from both private and public front-end cloud networks,” Robbins said.

While AI networking is just at the beginning, enterprise networking is Cisco’s bread-and-butter and at least in the second quarter of 2025, results are positive.

“Networking product orders grew double-digits driven by switching, enterprise routing, webscale infrastructure, and industrial networking applications in our IoT products,” Robbins said.

“Campus switching orders were up double digits and we expect our campus switching portfolio, as well as our WiFi 7 access points, to gain traction with increasing return-to-office policies,” Robbins said.

“We also continue to see robust order growth for data center switching, this being our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth,” Robbins said.   “We expect this to continue as our 800G Nexus switches based on our 51.2 terabit Silicon One chip become available in April for AI cloud buildouts.”