Cisco posted fiscal 2026 revenue of $63.3 billion, a 12% increase from the prior year, as enterprise customers and cloud providers accelerated spending on networking gear to support AI inference workloads. The twelve months ended July 25 produced the highest annual revenue in the company’s history, driven by a hardware refresh cycle that management described as a multiyear, multibillion-dollar super cycle.
The cloud order surge
Cloud provider orders reached $4 billion in the fourth quarter alone, pushing the full-year total to $9.3 billion, a 350% jump from fiscal 2025. That number is the clearest signal yet that hyperscalers are building out infrastructure for inference rather than just training, and it dwarfs the cloud contribution of previous years.
Enterprise refresh adds a second leg
The enterprise segment, where channel partners concentrate their business, also expanded as companies deployed AI models on-premises. Robbins said customers are investing across cloud, on-prem and edge environments, and that the mix between proprietary cloud models and open-weight on-prem deployments matters less to Cisco than the networking spend either way. The past two quarters have shown private data center networking picking up as open-weight models gain traction.
Component costs held in check
Despite memory and storage chip shortages, price increases stayed in the single digits. Robbins said the company secured supply through advance purchase commitments and strategic inventory builds. Dell’Oro Group projects global data center spending will reach $1.8 trillion by 2030, which should ease pricing pressure over time as new capacity comes online.
Security layer expands
Cisco closed its Astrix Security acquisition in June and released the first two Antares small language models on Hugging Face last month. The security angle, fueled by reports of rogue AI agents breaching corporate networks, is becoming a distinct driver of the hardware refresh cycle. Robbins summarized the enterprise calculus as cost, security and sovereignty all at once, which happens to align neatly with Cisco’s product portfolio.