Pictured: New Cisco innovation being showcased at Cisco Live Conference 2026, held in Amsterdam, 9 to 11 February 2026.
Cisco Innovation News summary:
- Cisco Silicon One G300 switch – a 102.4 Tbps switch silicon designed for massive AI cluster buildouts for real-time agentic workloads.
- Cisco is introducing G300-powered N9000 and 8000 systems designed for AI network builders
- New AgenticOps innovations across networking, security, and observability include new tools and platform enhancements.
- Facilitates a moves in the the 1.6T ethernet era, with scale out capabilities.
- Nexus switches N9364E-SP2R-X (P200) and N9364F-SG3 (G300).
- Cisco big-leap updates to its AI Defense solutions and advances to its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, including AI traffic optimisation – protections that work both ways: preventing AI agents from being compromised and controlling what they can access and do.
- Cisco CX and innovations in Collaboration systems scheduled for Q2.
- The Silicon One G300, G300-powered systems and optics will ship this year.
Industry-Firsts for Speed, Storage and Security
Cisco today is showcasing their industry-first innovations today, in Amsterdam, with the delivery of a robust portfolio of switches, optics, applications and more across hardware and software for critical infrastructure in the AI era.
At the Cisco Live Conference 2026, in front of more than 21,000 IT professionals, the company has unveiled a series of innovations that enable customers to raise their ambitions for secure and trusted Agentic AI.
These new products showcase Cisco’s ability to deliver networking, security, observability, and sovereignty through a unified technology platform.
Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco, has commented:
“AI innovation is moving faster than ever before and we’re delivering the critical infrastructure our customers need to move fast and adopt AI safely and securely. Today’s announcements highlight the power of Cisco as a unified platform, showcasing how our innovations in silicon and systems, AgenticOps, security and observability come together to unlock value for our customers from the data center to the workplace and beyond.”
Key innovations announced at Cisco Live Conference 2026 include:
Silicon One G300
The Silicon One G300 will allow customers to massively scale out their buildout of AI clusters. The G300 offers Intelligent Collective Networking, delivering a 33% increase in network utilization and a 28% improvement in job completion time versus non-optimized traffic (based on internal testing). Cisco is introducing G300-powered N9000 and 8000 systems designed for AI network builders, which spans hyperscalers, neoclouds, sovereign private deployments, service providers, and enterprises.
New systems will be available as a 100% liquid cooled design that, along with new optics, enables a customer to improve energy efficiency by nearly 70% (Cisco test results).
Additional innovation includes 1.6T OSFP (Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable) Optics, which deliver ultra-high bandwidth connectivity targeting AI scale out solutions for 1.6T switch to NIC links and 1.6T, 800G, 400G, or 200G switch to server links, offering customers high performance and reliability.
Other innovation enables reliability, sustainability and stablity, either reducing power or increasing speed, with the:
- 800G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO): reduces optical module power consumption by 50% compared to retimed optical modules. With new N9000 and 8000 systems supporting LPO, customers can reduce overall switch power by as much as 30%.
- Expanded Portfolio of Silicon One P200-powered Systems: new P200-powered N9000 systems and expanded OS support on 8223 systems deliver scale across, data center interconnect, universal spine, and core and peer routing capabilities to neoclouds, enterprises, and service providers. Cisco is also introducing new 28.8T modular line cards. This expansion of P200-powered offerings, combined with Cisco 800G ZR/ZR+ coherent pluggable optics, enables a wide range of customers to deploy a common architecture across multiple roles in their network.
Cisco Nexus One
With the introduction of the Nexus One unified management plane to simplify operations across on-premises and cloud-based data center deployments, Cisco’s AI infrastructure innovations ensure more profitable data centers, free from complexity, so customers can maximise their AI investments.
Nexus One allows customers to deploy fast and adapt their networks as demands shift, even across multiple sites. The Cisco N9000 systems serve as the common hardware for a diverse set of fabrics, including Nexus Hyperfabric, with a unified management plane to centralize operations. And API-driven automation and customisation are built-in.
With native Splunk platform integration coming in March, customers will be able to analyze network telemetry directly where data resides—without having to move it to external platforms. This is an essential capability for sovereign cloud deployments and compliance-sensitive environments where data locality is paramount.
How efficient is Cisco’s new innovation?
Through testing, it has been found that Cisco’s high-radix 102.4T liquid-cooled system reduces overall power consumption and delivers 70% greater efficiency than today’s equivalent bandwidth solution with six 51.2T air-cooled systems.
All these advancements minimise energy use, reduce cooling requirements, and extend component
lifespan, enabling more cost-effective and sustainable AI data centers.
New AgenticOps enabled by cross domain telemetry
New AgenticOps innovations will span the Cisco portfolio, helping to automate, scale, and simplify IT operations in the AI era. Cisco’s AgenticOps is informed by system wide awareness drawn from one of the industry’s richest sources of cross domain telemetry across Cisco Networking, Security Cloud Control, Cisco Nexus One, Splunk, and more. These new capabilities include tools, skills, and platform enhancements across networking, security, and observability.
Jeetu Patel continues:
“For teams responsible for operating and securing distributed networks and infrastructure, AgenticOps represents a profound and fundamental shift away from complexity. This is the true power of Cisco as a platform. By delivering agentic capabilities aligned to critical IT operations priorities, we’re combining Cisco’s unique cross‑domain visibility, purpose-built models, and governance together to supercharge teams.”
Highest levels of Security and Control
The biggest-ever updates to Cisco AI Defense bring AI supply chain governance and runtime protections to agentic tool use, reducing the risk of compromise or manipulation.
In addition, AI-driven advancements to Cisco Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) include intent-aware inspection of agentic AI interactions and tool requests, evaluating the “why” and “how” of agentic traffic to ward off novel threats. New advances in detection is at the heart of the innovation and embedded in the new innovation and workflows. Features include:
AI BOM (Bill of Materials): Governance for AI software assets to secure the AI supply chain
MCP Catalog: Discovers, inventories, and helps manage risk across MCP servers and registries across public and private platforms.
Advanced algorithmic red teaming: Expands the scope of AI security assessments with adaptive single and multi-turn testing for models and agents in multiple languages
Real-time agentic guardrails: Continuously monitoring and inspecting agentic interactions to detect manipulation or unsafe behaviour
Organisations can access a suite of capabilities that help them securely adopt AI technology while maintaining agent integrity and control of agentic interactions, offering peace of mind with security and defences in place. AI Defense’s runtime protections feature a developer-ready integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails’ open source framework, offering organisations a modular, interoperable architecture to protect AI systems in real time in production.
Cisco Customer Experience (CX)
Customers running a sovereign environment need support and expertise that follow similar boundaries. Cisco Customer Experience (CX) is now providing support for these sovereignty needs, with options for air-gapped, on-prem, and hybrid setups. New innovations in Cisco’s room kits and collaboration software is expected in Q2 2026.
Cisco Critical National Services Centers
Cisco Critical National Services Centers (CNSCs) across the UK, France, and Spain have been rolled out to support organisations with their strict requirements.
These centers operate under rigorous controls, with dedicated facilities, segregated operational processes, and cleared personnel. Beyond Cisco’s standard Technical Assistance Center (TAC) channels, CNSCs help customers to resolve technical support issues through secure, approved channels that respect their data-handling policies. Building on a 15-year legacy in Germany, Cisco now has 4 CNSCs across Europe with a further CNSC under development in Italy.
Insustry Reaction and Enthusiam
The best endorsement for innovation comes from industry leaders, and Thomas Berger, Director for Data Center Networking at Computacenter US, states
“Our hyperscale and neocloud customers need networking that matches GPU density. Cisco’s
N9000 with NX-OS delivers programmability and telemetry to optimize every flow. The G300 silicon enhances this with industry-leading buffers, power efficiency, and 1.6T port density. Through our strategic partnership with Cisco, we deliver lossless, high-performance networking for AI training and inference. The Nexus One Platform ensures predictable performance—deep buffers manage bursty traffic, and Intelligent Packet Flow maximizes GPU utilization.”
More news and details to follow in News in the Channel magazine and website, and UC Advanced magazine and website: Magazine Rack.
