Cisco and NVIDIA Partnership Boosts AI Ethernet
Cisco has announced a partnership with NVIDIA that will combine the two vendors’ technologies to serve enterprise AI requirements.
The deal is very important for the industry because it shows the world's largest networking vendor is willing to partner with the world's most important AI infrastructure company (and vice versa). This will serve to deliver more integrated products focused on Ethernet and avoid the potential for fragmentation for AI network infrastructure.
The deal minimizes Cisco’s competition with NVIDIA in Ethernet networking, making them partners. It couples Cisco’s Silicon One ASICs with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform. Specifically, Silicon One chips compatible with several Cisco switches and network fabrics will be added to NVIDIA’s BlueField-3 SuperNIC, which combined with NVIDIA’s Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch comprise the Spectrum-X platform.
Cisco said it will be the sole silicon provider to integrate with NVIDIA’s Ethernet products at the chip level. This is a big win for Cisco, which has been focused on pushing Silicon One as a key differentiator in its product lines, as an alternative to Broadcom chips. For NVIDIA, it diversifies its distribution and gives it access to Cisco's huge sales channel.
Goal: Enterprise AI
The goal of the tie-up is to provide enterprise customers with a streamlined way to design AI-compatible networks, thereby benefiting both vendors. "Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are partnering to remove barriers for customers and ensure they can optimize their infrastructure investments to unlock the power of AI,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins in a statement.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang weighed in, stressing his company’s role: "NVIDIA Spectrum-X is Ethernet enhanced and supercharged for AI. Together with Cisco's enterprise platforms and global reach, we can help companies worldwide build state-of-the-art NVIDIA infrastructure as they race to transform with AI."
Clearly, both vendors are eager to boost the market for enterprise AI, which remains slow on the uptake due to the complexities of adopting AI networking. If the alliance can help eliminate some of that complexity, it could benefit both Cisco and NVIDIA.
Silicon One for AMD’s DPU Too
Cisco’s NVIDIA news comes just days after Cisco announced a similar deal with AMD, in which Cisco Silicon One E100 ASICs will be combined with AMD’s Pensando data processing units (DPUs) in a new line of datacenter switches called the N9300 Series.
That announcement was more subdued, and Cisco said the first N9300 Smart Switch, due out this spring, will be focused on adding its Hypershield security service to AI workloads. It makes sense that this announcement got more attention because NVIDIA is the leader in AI compute infrastructure, with AMD in second-place. Neither Cisco nor NVIDIA shares made big moves on the announcement, probably because larger macro issues are looming over questions about AI infrastructure spending. In NVIDIA's earnings this afternoon, we'll get a lot more information about that.
The deal means Cisco now has several options to distribute highly integrated AI networking systems. For example, there’s nothing to prohibit the Cisco-compatible AMD and NVIDIA products being deployed in the same network. Still, given NVIDIA’s and Cisco’s top rankings in their respective market segments, integration with Spectrum-X represents a more significant partnership for Cisco.
What About Others?
The Cisco/NVIDIA deal strengthens both vendors' position against rivals such as Juniper Networks and Arista. The Arista deployment in particular has been a threat to NVIDIA at the Ethernet AI networking level, particularly given its deployment at Meta and its adoption of improvements to Ethernet, including advanced congestion management and load balancing to deliver lossless and low-latency AI networking.
Arista, like Cisco and NVIDIA, is also a member of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), which aims to deliver standards-based improvements to Ethernet, including Ultra Ethernet Transport, a modern transport protocol that will be designed to deliver the performance that AI applications require with all the advantages of the Ethernet/IP ecosystem.
Arista has been more vocal in supporting UEC than NVIDIA has. When asked, that vendor typically says that NVIDIA will support industry standards as they emerge. But this deal lends more evidence that the industry is coalescing around Ethernet-based solutions.
Momentum for Cisco
Ultimately, the integration deal with NVIDIA gives Cisco a boost that helps build momentum generated by Cisco’s recent earnings report. While questions remain about how well Cisco will fare given the current U.S. administration’s domestic budget cuts and international import tariffs, the latest outlook for sales and EPS exceeds Wall Street models.
The new Cisco-plus-NVIDIA Spectrum-X SuperNICs will be available midyear, Cisco said. They will work with Cisco’s Nexus datacenter switches and Nexus Hyperfabric services, and Unified Computing System (UCS) products.
Cisco also plans a separate series of switches combining Silicon One with its operating system software in a new line of Spectrum-compatible switches. Those are slated for delivery at an unspecified later date.
Futuriom Take: Cisco's new teaming with NVIDIA could boost both vendors' prospects in enterprise Ethernet-based AI datacenters, an area where progress has been slow due to the requirements of accelerated computing for generative AI applications.
(Mary Jander helped write this story, without any AI.)
