By Mike Wheatley
Publication Date: 2026-10-12 15:00:00
Cisco Systems Inc. took to the stage at the annual Open Compute Project Global Summit today, unveiling a new suite of open silicon and optical networking systems as it delivered one of the event’s most eagerly anticipated keynotes.
The new innovations are designed to meet the growing demands of power- and data-hungry artificial intelligence workloads. They underscore Cisco’s longstanding commitment to fulfilling these needs with an open infrastructure stack that can be deployed by hyperscalers, neoclouds and enterprises alike.
Networking has become a major bottleneck in AI data centers. As frontier models become more powerful, they need to tap into enormous clusters made up of thousands of graphics processing units and other AI accelerators.
The challenge is to enable all of the chips within a cluster to act as one giant processor, and it’s not an easy one to solve. In order to scale these AI clusters, data center operators need a way to move significantly more data from…