Cisco Systems scales programmable AI network capacity with new silicon and repluggable optics innovations

What happened

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. 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. Cisco is a networking hardware and infrastructure platform company based in San Jose, and its products and services include network switches.

The new innovations are designed to meet the growing demands of power- and data-hungry artificial intelligence workloads. UPDATED 11:00 EDT / OCTOBER 12 2026 INFRA Cisco Systems scales programmable AI network capacity with new silicon and repluggable optics innovations by Mike Wheatley Cisco Systems Inc.

Networking has become a major bottleneck in AI data centers (a building full of computers that runs online services). 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. Central to this vision is Cisco’s newly updated Silicon One chip family.