By Surbhi Jain
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 14:14:00
Everyone wants to know who will win the AI infrastructure race.
• Cisco Systems stock is showing positive momentum. Where is CSCO stock headed?
Speaking on Semafor’s CEO Signal podcast, Robbins said Cisco’s current role in the AI buildout can be traced back to a silicon company acquisition completed in 2016.
That’s a striking admission from the CEO of a company increasingly positioning itself as one of the key suppliers behind the AI boom.
The AI Asset Nobody Saw Coming
While Nvidia Corp‘s (NASDAQ:NVDA) GPUs have become the face of AI infrastructure, Robbins argued that AI systems require far more than processors.
“At the end of the day, you have to connect all these things,” he said.
Cisco’s acquisition gave the company ownership of networking silicon that now sits at the heart of the connectivity layer powering large AI clusters. According to Robbins, owning that technology has become an increasingly important competitive advantage.
If networking vendors rely on…