Cisco, Nvidia expand AI partnership to include Silicon One technology

In addition, Cisco and Nvidia will invest in cross-portfolio technology to tackle common challenges like congestion management and load balancing, ensuring that enterprises can accelerate their AI deployments, Patel stated.

The vendors said they would also collaborate to create and validate Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) and Enterprise Reference Architectures based on Nvidia Spectrum-X with Cisco Silicon One, Hyperfabric, Nexus, UCS Compute, Optics, and other Cisco technologies.

History of Cisco, Nvidia collaborations

The announcement is just the latest expansion of the Cisco/Nvidia partnership. The companies have already worked together to make Nvidia’s Tensor Core GPUs available in Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) rack and blade servers, including Cisco UCS X-Series and UCS X-Series Direct, to support AI and data-intensive workloads in the data center and at the edge. The integrated package includes Nvidia AI Enterprise software, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI.

Earlier this month, Cisco said it has shipped the UCS C845A M8 Rack Server for enterprise data center environments. The 8U rack server is built on Nvidia’s HGX platform and designed to deliver the accelerated compute capabilities needed for AI workloads such as LLM training, model fine-tuning, large model inferencing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

The companies are also collaborating on AI Pods, which are preconfigured, validated, and optimized infrastructure packages that customers can plug into their data center or edge environments as needed.

The Pods are based on Cisco Validated Design principals, which provide a blueprint for building reliable, scalable, and secure network infrastructures, according to Cisco. The Pods include Nvidia AI Enterprise, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI, and are managed through Cisco Intersight.