AI-related hardware and software are driving growth across Cisco's product portfolio.
Cisco is riding a multi-year “networking supercycle” fueled by demand for AI-related hardware and software across its product portfolio, CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts on the vendor’s fiscal fourth-quarter financial call. Accelerating adoption of agentic AI is driving customers to invest in Cisco’s networking stack across cloud, on-premise and edge environments, he said.
“We delivered record revenue of $17.3 billion in the quarter, up an impressive 18% year-over-year with product revenue up 24% year-over-year,” Robbins said.
In particular, Q4 networking product orders increased 40% year-over-year, marking the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Total product orders increased 35% (25% when excluding hyperscalers), with double-digit order growth across all geographies and customer markets, Robbins said.
For the full year, revenue came in a $63.3 billion, which is up 12% compared to 2025. Looking to fiscal 2027, Cisco executives said they expect revenue to be in the range of $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion, continuing the current momentum.
AI networking demand
Robbins said demand for AI infrastructure is growing, with more than $400 million in AI infrastructure orders from neocloud, sovereign, and enterprise customers in Q4, totaling $1 billion for the year. Specifically, enterprise Nexus switch orders tagged for AI deployments rose more than 85% sequentially.
Campus networking orders are up 20% year-over-year, and next-generation switching, routing, and wireless products continue to ramp faster than prior products launches, Robbins said, but it’s still early in the refresh cycle. As of the end of its fiscal 2026 year, 7% of the campus switching installed base has been refreshed, and Cisco still expects refreshes to be a $100 billion-plus opportunity.
“Cisco expects on-premises AI infrastructure to become increasingly important due to cost optimization and low latency requirements,” Robbins said.
Cisco also reported data center networking orders grew 25% year-over-year to $1.3 billion in FY26, driven by triple-digit growth in neocloud, sovereign cloud and enterprise AI orders. Hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders were $9.3 billion in FY26, which includes $4 billion in orders in Q4.
Security revenue climbs 14% in Q4
Cisco’s entire security portfolio, including Splunk, saw double digit order growth in Q4, Cisco reported.
Security revenue grew 14% year-over-year in Q4, with more than 1,500 customers adopting new products such as Secure Access, XDR, HyperShield, and AI Defense, bringing the total new customer count for these products to 6,400 since launch, Robbins noted. Firewall orders increased more than 30%, and AI security features like AI Defense and guardrails are gaining traction as customers seek unified protection across users, apps, and agents.
“I would say that you’re beginning to see a trend where our customers are looking at AI readiness, Mythos readiness, quantum readiness, in a similar vein to how they’ve looked at cybersecurity spend over the last three to five years,” Robbins said.
“There is agentic security that is coming into it. There is security of my data, there is sovereignty of my data that comes into it. So what we believe is going to happen is you are going to have customers that are going to make intelligent decisions about which models they use based on use cases, and which ones are most appropriate for whatever agentic applications they are running,” Robbins said.
“As you see [customers] deploy agents in this whole focus on agentic security and the network implications of running thousands and thousands of agents in your infrastructure and the performance and the latency issues, the edge deployments that are going to occur, we think that regardless of the architecture that enterprise customers choose to take and how they deploy, whether it is on-prem or cloud, we think it is going to be a positive for us,” Robbins said.
Robbins said Cisco has seen the sales pipeline increase meaningfully as a result of Mythos. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, released earlier this year, showed that AI systems could identify and probe network vulnerabilities at a speed that traditional patch management systems can’t handle.
“New AI models, especially those from Anthropic, have triggered a new set of actions for how we build and secure our products,” wrote Anthony Grieco, chief security and trust officer at Cisco, in a recent blog post. “We are using these new capabilities to find and fix vulnerabilities at a speed and scale previously impossible, while simultaneously accelerating the development of security products capable of defending against AI-enabled adversaries.”
“As Agentic AI workloads rapidly expand, with AI agents being deployed in data centers, deployed across application environments, and engaging continuously with end-users, network traffic will not only exceed today’s chatbot levels, but agents will keep it persistently high through their ongoing interactions, resulting in a +450% increase in traffic versus humans,” Cisco stated in its results presentation. “Because AI agents must process data and respond at machine speed, ultra-low latency connectivity is mission critical from the edge to the data center core. This fundamental shift will require networks to be upgraded, with multiple layers of security embedded deeply into the fabric of the network to safeguard every interaction. Cisco is uniquely positioned to provide the critical infrastructure needed for the AI era.”
