Cisco expects AI infrastructure revenue to more than double to $9 billion

Cisco’s networking growth is carrying into a larger AI business. Alongside fiscal first-quarter results, the company forecast $9 billion in AI infrastructure revenue for fiscal 2027, more than double its fiscal 2026 level. The outlook follows sharp increases in cloud-customer and networking orders, giving management a stronger basis for its claim of a sustained equipment-buying cycle.

A multiquarter buildup reaches a record quarter

The AI forecast comes after several quarters of customer commitments. CEO Chuck Robbins said Cisco had secured 18 AI design wins over the previous five quarters. Networking product orders have also grown at double-digit rates for nine consecutive quarters, putting the latest results within a longer run of demand rather than a single-quarter jump.

For the fiscal first quarter ended October 24, Cisco reported record revenue of $18.5 billion, up 24% from a year earlier. Adjusted earnings per share reached $1.40, a 40% increase. Robbins described those as Cisco’s strongest revenue and adjusted earnings growth rates in more than 15 years.

Those are company-wide results, not a measure of AI sales alone. Cisco attributed the quarter’s performance to demand spanning AI infrastructure, security and campus network upgrades. That mix is important to management’s argument: its growth story rests on several kinds of network spending, not just equipment bought for AI workloads.

These broad-based results support our view that we are in the early stages of a multiyear, multibillion-dollar networking supercycle.

Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO, on the quarterly financial call

Cloud orders lead, but enterprise demand follows

Orders from service-provider and cloud customers rose 47% year over year. Across Cisco’s networking portfolio, product orders increased 28%. These figures describe different views of demand—one by customer group, the other by product category—and neither is the growth rate for Cisco’s AI infrastructure revenue.

The networking gains reached every product family Robbins identified: service-provider routing, compute, enterprise routing, wireless, data-center switching and campus switching. Each recorded double-digit order growth. The breadth gives substance to his description of a networking cycle, although the claim that it will last for years remains management’s outlook.

Enterprise product orders rose 15%, following 4% growth a year earlier. Cisco reported double-digit enterprise order growth across every geography and in both networking and security. Campus networking orders increased 14%, with Robbins saying the next-generation portfolio was gaining traction faster than earlier product launches.

The next phase connects AI across data centers

For the largest cloud operators, Cisco described a change in how its equipment is being used. Robbins said customers are deploying its scale-across networking architecture in production to coordinate AI workloads across data centers. That places the network between facilities within the company’s account of expanding AI infrastructure demand.

The enterprise opportunity follows a different pattern. Robbins said customers expect to run AI applications in the cloud while also investing heavily in private data centers. Some want to run open-weight and open-source models on their own infrastructure, and to train models using their own data there.

Cisco has recorded double-digit order growth in enterprise data-center networking in nine of the past 11 quarters, Robbins said. He also put the campus upgrade transition at less than 10% complete. Those are two distinct sources of potential future business: private data-center investment and replacement of existing campus networks.

The $9 billion fiscal 2027 AI figure is a revenue forecast, not an order total or completed sales. Cisco’s task now is to deliver that growth alongside the broader network upgrades already driving customer demand.