AI infrastructure ahead of plan and growing Cisco reported more than $800 million in AI infrastructure orders from webscale customers in the fourth quarter, bringing the total for 2025 to more than $2 billion, which is over 2x what the company originally projected. This is a mix of its own Nexus switches, optics, AI PODs, UCS servers and Silicon One. Success here is critical for Cisco, as at one time, the company had next to no business with the hyperscalers. The development of Silicon One was pivotal in Cisco’s success with this audience, as it’s given them market leading price performance. Cisco has also cultivated a partnership with Nvidia and is the only company to have its silicon integrated into the GPU maker’s Spectrum-X product. There is another wave of business coming for Cisco in this area selling AI infrastructure to non-hyperscalers. Robbins talked about this: “The Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia provides a blueprint for building AI-ready data centers for enterprises, sovereign cloud providers and newly emerging neocloud providers. We expect the sovereign AI opportunity to build momentum in the second half of fiscal year ’26.” AI will drive campus upgrades Most of the focus of network growth in AI has been in the data center, as that’s where the growth has been. However, the traffic agentic AI creates will drive campus upgrades as well. On the call, Cisco showed a chart of traffic generated by chatbots pre and post agentic, and it shows Cisco is expecting agentic to drive a consistent level of traffic that most networks are not able to handle. Robbin explained: “Network traffic will not only increase beyond the peaks of current chatbot interaction but will remain consistently high with agents in constant interaction.” The impact of this is twofold. The bump in traffic

More Nvidia news from SIGGRAPH The RTX Pro server wasn’t the only news at the show. Nvidia also announced two new models of its Nemotron model family – the Nemotron Nano 2 and Llama Nemotron Super 1.5 – with advanced reasoning capabilities for building smarter AI agents. Nemotron is a family of enterprise-ready, open large language models (LLM) designed to enhance agentic AI for tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning, instruction following, coding, tool use, and multimodal (text+vision) understanding. These models deliver high accuracy for their relative size in areas such as scientific reasoning, coding, tool use, instruction following and chat, according to Nvidia. They are designed to imbue AI agents with deeper cognitive abilities and help AI systems explore options, weigh decisions and deliver results within defined constraints. Nvidia claims Nemotron Nano 2 achieves up to six times higher token generation throughput compared to other models its size. Llama Nemotron Super 1.5 offers top-tier performance and leads in reasoning accuracy, making it suitable for handling complex enterprise tasks. Also, Nvidia is empowering robotics and machines to “see” and react to what they see with new AI models that can ingest visual information and think about said information. The vendor just announced Cosmos Reason, a new open, customizable 7 billion-parameter reasoning Vision Language Models, or VLMs. VLMs allow robots and vision agents to think about what they see, just like a human. Up to now, robots have had the ability to “see,” but their reaction to what they saw was extremely limited. A VLM provides robotics with the ability to think about their actions.

Adding a little more color to the enterprise results, Robbins called out some of Cisco’s network modernization offerings for customers. “We’ve got [our] routing refresh, we’ve got a lot of new technology in our data center networking business … we have Wi-Fi 7 gear, which grew triple digits year over year. We’re in year eight of the [Catalyst 9000] offering, and honestly, if you look at products that were pre-[Catalyst 9000] that are still installed in our customer base, there’s tens of billions of dollars of install base there that we can go after,” Robbins said. Demand for AI infrastructure will extend to enterprises, Robbins said: “If you think about the AI revolution…We tend to see these things begin first in the cloud providers, which we’re clearly seeing the AI play in the cloud providers. Then we see it shift into the enterprise. We see a shift in the back end, in this case, from the back end to the front end. We believe that will occur as enterprises start using more of these services, and then enterprises will also build out inferencing… and we’re even seeing the telco business actually pick up as they’re telling us they’re increasing their network capacity and they’re modernizing their infrastructure in preparation for AI. So, we think AI is going to drive network modernization across all of these segments.” Taking aim at security Overall security order growth in Q4 was up double digits, Robbins said. “We have 80 new Hypershield customers, largely connected to this new smart switch [the N9300 Smart Switch]. So that strategy is working. And I would say that we had 480-plus new SSE customers during the quarter. So that’s our secure services edge [which] is really getting good traction. Robbins singled out the demand for integrated networking and security

In the latest episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent sits down with Jay Dietrich, Research Director of Sustainability at Uptime Institute, to examine what real sustainability looks like inside the data center, and why popular narratives around net zero, offsets, and carbon neutrality often obscure more than they reveal. Over the course of our conversation, Dietrich walks listeners through Uptime’s expanding role in guiding data center operators toward measurable sustainability outcomes; not just certifications, but operational performance improvements at the facility level. “Window Dressing” vs. Real Progress Dietrich is candid about the challenges operators face in navigating the current landscape of sustainability reporting. Despite high-level claims of carbon neutrality, many facilities still operate inefficiently, relying heavily on carbon offsets or energy attribute certificates to hit corporate goals. “An EU survey found that 80% of data centers report carbon-free operations based on market calculations, while their national grids run at only 55% renewable,” Dietrich says. “The only thing that truly matters is the performance of the actual facility.” To close this gap, Uptime offers a Sustainability Gap Analysis and a Sustainable Operations Certification, helping data center operators minimize energy and water use, improve cooling efficiency, and increase the useful work delivered per megawatt hour. Redefining the Sustainable Data Center One of the discussion’s core messages: a net zero data center is not necessarily a sustainable one. Dietrich stresses the need to shift focus from corporate carbon accounting toward IT utilization, emphasizing metrics like: Work delivered per unit of energy consumed. Work delivered per metric ton of CO₂ emitted (location-based). Actual IT infrastructure utilization rates. Underutilized IT infrastructure — still common across the industry — is one of the biggest sustainability blind spots. “Running IT at 10% utilization wastes capacity, space, and energy,” says Dietrich. “Increasing that

Each month Data Center Frontier, in partnership with Pkaza, posts some of the hottest data center career opportunities in the market. Here’s a look at some of the latest data center jobs posted on the Data Center Frontier jobs board, powered by Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting. Peter Kazella of Pkaza Critical Facilities Recruiting provides tips for building a healthy applicant pool. Switchgear Field Service Technician – Critical Facilities Nationwide Travel  This position is also available in any major data center region: Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Denver, CO; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Las Vegas, NV; or Phoenix, AZ. Multiple opportunities for both senior and mid-level switchgear field service technicians. These openings are with a nationwide market leader of power distribution solutions, specializing in switchgear and controls for mission-critical environments. This company provides customized solutions for enterprise, colocation, and hyperscale data centers, ensuring reliability and uptime through controls integration, power distribution solutions, and switchgear installations. Their services include installations, retrofits, upgrades, turnkey electrical solutions, and preventive & corrective maintenance of UPS, switchgear, generators, and PLC systems. This is an excellent career-growth opportunity to work on exciting projects with leading-edge technology and competitive compensation. Electrical Commissioning Engineer New Albany, OH This traveling position is also available in: Richmond, VA; Ashburn, VA; Charlotte, NC; Atlanta, GA; Hampton, GA; Fayetteville, GA; Minneapolis, MN; Phoenix, AZ; Dallas, TX; or Chicago, IL. *** ALSO looking for a LEAD EE and ME CxA agents and CxA PMs *** Our client is an engineering design and commissioning company that has a national footprint and specializes in MEP critical facilities design. They provide design, commissioning, consulting and management expertise in the critical facilities space. They have a mindset to provide reliability, energy efficiency, sustainable design and LEED expertise when providing these consulting services for enterprise, colocation and hyperscale companies. This career-growth

Data Center Frontier Editor in Chief Matt Vincent and Contributing Editor Bill Kleyman (CEO/Apolo) recently had another video chat to discuss the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit 2025 and, in particular, the event’s focus on data center power. The second annual Trends Summit is scheduled for August 26-28 in Reston, Virginia. Register Now This second QuickChat in our series—following the opening discussion that set the stage for the conference—now zeroes in on data center power challenges. The conversation explores how AI’s exponential growth is straining power infrastructure, turning energy into both a critical market-entry barrier and a defining theme of the event. The Power Challenge: Quantifying the Scale Kleyman outlined the sheer scale of the power challenge facing the industry. He cited a Goldman Sachs report projecting that U.S. data center power consumption, currently around 2-3% of total consumption, could more than double to 8-9% by 2028. He also highlighted a forecast that the data center industry will require upwards of 50 gigawatts (GW) of power by 2035, a figure he put into perspective by noting that 1 GW can power a city of a million people. The discussion mentions a few large-scale projects that illustrate this trend: Kevin O’Leary‘s Wonder Valley project in Alberta, Canada, aiming for 8 GW. Tract’s new multi-gigawatt campus project in Texas amid plans for a staggering 25 GW national build-out. Kleyman also referenced the NVL576 rack unveiled at Nvidia GTC 2025, which is capable of supporting 600 kilowatts (kW) per rack, signaling the official arrival of the “megawatt era class of data center racks.” Grid-Optional Solutions and the Summit Panels The discussion transitioned to how the industry is moving from being solely grid-reliant to “grid-optional.” A significant trend highlighted is the inclusion of behind-the-meter power generation in new builds, with 30% of new U.S. data