By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 07:46:00
The presence of AI luminaries like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Sam Altman of OpenAI at a Cisco event earlier this year symbolized how one of Silicon Valley’s most established but staid companies has repositioned itself. The network hardware pioneer missed the shift to the cloud, but has recast itself under Chuck Robbins as a pivotal player in AI infrastructure, and it now counts Huang and Altman’s companies among its partners.
“At the end of the day, you have to connect all these things,” Robbins says of the chipmakers and large language model companies in an interview for The CEO Signal show. What Cisco provides is “the plumbing” to do so, after a decade of investments in silicon and software that have radically changed Cisco’s business model.
Some of those bets took time to show returns — six years, in the case of his $1 billion investment in Cisco’s Silicon One architecture — but Robbins is now reaping the rewards. Cisco’s stock is up more than 55% so far…
