Cisco Wins Over AI Customers With Merchant Silicon And Optics

We
are all full aware of what the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and AI model
builders are all doing to build out their datacenter infrastructure to support
their AI aspirations. But it is hard to get a sense of what regular enterprises,
service providers, governments, academic institutions, neoclouds, and sovereigns
– who will eventually represent maybe half of total AI spending – are doing. So
we have to use the sales of the traditional original equipment manufacturers as
a kind of proxy.

Depending
on the OEM, there are a fair amount of sales of chips or systems to
hyperscalers and cloud builders in the mix. IBM has basically none, Hewlett
Packard Enterprise, Dell, and Lenovo quite a bit more, and Supermico has most
of its sales to handful of very large companies and is more like an ODM. Cisco
Systems is somewhere in the middle, selling plenty of AI stuff to hyperscalers
and cloud builders but also selling AI wares into its vast UCS system customer
base, which…