By Radek Strnad
Publication Date: 2026-05-18 18:04:00
What Happened?
Shares of networking technology giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) jumped 14.6% in the morning session after it reported first-quarter results that topped Wall Street’s expectations and provided surprisingly strong guidance for the upcoming quarter.
Cisco raised its fiscal 2026 AI infrastructure order outlook from $5 billion to $9 billion, 4.5 times what it booked in all of fiscal 2025, after hyperscaler AI orders alone reached $1.9 billion in a single quarter, more than triple the $600 million from the same period last year. CEO Chuck Robbins confirmed five new hyperscaler design wins in the quarter, including the first deployments of Cisco’s proprietary Silicon One P200 chip in scale-across data centre configurations.
For years, Cisco was seen as a mature enterprise-networking company with limited AI exposure. The $9 billion AI order figure reframes that entirely: Cisco’s custom silicon and Acacia optics business, are now a direct pick-and-shovel play on…
