Cisco Projects $9 Billion in AI Infrastructure Revenue for FY27

Cisco now expects $9 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers in fiscal year 2027, more than double its fiscal 2026 levels — a forecast the company raised alongside record quarterly results. CEO Chuck Robbins delivered both numbers on Cisco's quarterly financial call for its fiscal first quarter, which ended October 24.

The quarter itself was Cisco's strongest in over a decade and a half. "In Q1, we delivered record quarterly revenue of $18.5 billion, up 24% year over year, and record non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.40, up 40% year over year," Robbins said. "These are our strongest top and bottom-line growth rates in over 15 years."

The stakes are straightforward: hyperscalers building AI data centers need vast quantities of switching, routing and interconnect gear, and Cisco is competing for that spend against rivals with deep AI-cluster experience. Robbins argues the demand is not a one-quarter anomaly but the start of something structural. The question every investor and buyer should ask is whether a forecast two fiscal years out can survive a change in hyperscaler capex plans.

How broad was the demand?

By Cisco's own order metrics, the growth was not confined to a single product line. "Networking product orders grew 28% in Q1, delivering our ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth," Robbins said. "In fact, we saw double-digit growth across every product family: service provider routing, compute, enterprise routing, wireless, data center switching and campus switching."

Enterprise product orders rose 15% year over year, on top of 4% growth a year earlier, with double-digit growth across all geographies and in both networking and security. Campus networking — the switches and wireless gear inside corporate offices — saw product orders grow 14% year over year. "Our next-generation portfolio continues to ramp faster than prior product launches, and we believe we are still very early in this refresh cycle," Robbins said.

Service provider and cloud customers grew product orders 47% year over year. "Overall, our hyperscaler business continues to show strong momentum with AI infrastructure revenue projected to grow to $9 billion in fiscal year '27, more than double fiscal year '26 levels," Robbins said. "Hyperscalers are now deploying our scale-across networking architecture and production environments as they extend coordinated AI workloads across data centers." In plain terms: the AI forecast rests on hyperscalers moving Cisco gear from trials into live production.

What will sustain the supercycle?

Robbins attributed the results to what he calls a "multiyear, multibillion-dollar networking supercycle" and cited five technology drivers he said would keep it running:

• Hyperscale wins. Cisco logged 18 AI design wins (selections by hyperscalers for specific data center builds) in the last five quarters. "And obviously, we raised the AI guidance to $9 billion, more than double what it was last year. So, that's the first that we expect to continue," Robbins said. Design wins convert to revenue on a lag; Cisco did not break out how much of the $9 billion is already booked.
• Campus refresh. Campus network modernization has posted double-digit order growth over multiple quarters. "We're still in the very early stages, less than 10% on the transition," Robbins said — meaning roughly 90% of the installed base has yet to upgrade.
• Mythos. Robbins pointed to a post-Mythos opportunity, saying customers are already attributing orders to early Mythos implications. "We heard it in Europe as an example, with service providers relative to the managed services CPE that they're needing to upgrade for their customers," he said. "And while customers want to move fast, they want to do this right. So, they're taking the appropriate time to plan, to design the right architecture, because they know if they're going to go through doing this, they got to get the architecture exactly right." The caveat is embedded in the quote itself: careful planning can slow orders.
• Sovereignty. Countries, beginning in Europe, want infrastructure they control operationally. "We are fortunate that we're one of the few companies that has maintained a robust on-premise portfolio," Robbins said. Cisco announced Sovereign Critical Infrastructure for Europe a year ago, expanded it to Canada, and has preannounced it in India, with further rollouts planned. Work with sovereign cloud providers such as Humai and G42 also continues to grow, he said.
• The hybrid data center. Enterprises are running AI in the cloud but also investing in private data centers to train on their own data and run open-weight and open-source models. "That's why we've seen 9 out of the last 11 quarters; we've seen double-digit order growth in our enterprise data center networking business," Robbins said.

The through-line is that no single driver carries the forecast. That diversification is the argument for durability; it is also a reason Cisco cannot easily attribute slowdowns if two drivers soften at once.

Where does security fit in?

Security contributed materially to the quarter. Core security products — excluding Splunk, the platform Cisco acquired in 2024 — grew 15%, the best performance in three years. Firewall orders grew more than 30% for the third consecutive quarter.

Cisco's zero-trust secure access portfolio, which includes Duo, Secure Access, Identity Services Engine and other products, did not exist three years ago. It now has 5,400 customers, with almost 800 added in Q1 alone.

At the AI layer, Robbins said Cisco is "now protecting 2 trillion tokens per month" and is "approaching 500 customers" for AI Defense, its product line for securing AI applications and models. Cisco is using Splunk as a platform for AI security, and Robbins said customers are buying into security and networking converging — specifically monitoring workloads and east-west traffic segmentation (traffic between servers inside a data center) with technologies like Hypershield and Live Protect.

The company also moved on AI-powered offense this week. "Earlier this week, we announced that we are integrating Anthropic's Claude Mythos cybersecurity model into Cisco AI Defense for adaptive AI red teaming," Robbins said. "This provides automated, continuous testing across enterprise systems, empowering defenders to stress test AI systems with frontier adversary reasoning."

Security growth at this pace is a genuine data point, but the zero-trust and AI Defense portfolios remain young; a few quarters of momentum does not establish a franchise.

What comes next?

Cisco has now tied its growth story to five named drivers, a doubled AI revenue forecast, and a campus refresh it says is less than 10% complete. The test of the supercycle thesis will be whether the $9 billion fiscal 2027 figure survives contact with actual hyperscaler deployments — and Robbins, notably, framed that number as what the company "expects to continue," not what it has contracted.