Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) continues to transform the network into an AI innovation platform, unveiling the Silicon One G300, a 102.4 Tbps switching silicon designed for massive AI cluster buildouts. The Cisco Silicon One G300 will power new Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 systems that push the frontier of AI networking in the data center. The systems feature innovative liquid cooling and support high-density optics to achieve new efficiency benchmarks and ensure customers get the most out of their GPU investments. In addition, the company enhanced Nexus One to make it easier for enterprises to operate their AI networks — on-premises or in the cloud — removing the complexity that can hold organizations back from scaling AI data centers.
"We are spearheading performance, manageability, and security in AI networking by innovating across the full stack - from silicon to systems and software," said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "We’re building the foundation for the future of infrastructure, supporting every type of customer—from hyperscalers to enterprises—as they shift to AI-powered workloads.”
“As AI training and inference continues to scale, data movement is the key to efficient AI compute; the network becomes part of the compute itself. It’s not just about faster GPUs – the network must deliver scalable bandwidth and reliable, congestion-free data movement,” said Martin Lund, Executive Vice President of Cisco’s Common Hardware Group. “Cisco Silicon One G300, powering our new Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 systems, delivers high-performance, programmable, and deterministic networking – enabling every customer to fully utilize their compute and scale AI securely and reliably in production.”
Silicon One G300: The Networking Foundation for the Agentic Era
The new Silicon One G300 is a 102.4 Tbps switching silicon that exemplifies Cisco’s rapid innovation and sets a new standard for AI backend networking. It is designed to power massive, distributed AI clusters with high performance, security, and reliability.
The G300 uniquely offers Intelligent Collective Networking, which combines an industry-leading fully shared packet buffer, path-based load balancing, and proactive network telemetry to offer better performance and profitability for large-scale data centers. It efficiently absorbs bursty AI traffic, responds faster to link failures, and prevents packet drops that can stall jobs, ensuring reliable data delivery even over long distances. With Intelligent Collective Networking, Cisco can deliver 33% increased network utilization, and a 28% reduction in job completion time versus simulated non-optimized path selection, making AI data centers more profitable with more tokens generated per GPU-hour.
Cisco Silicon One G300 is highly programmable, enabling equipment to be upgraded for new network functionality even after it has been deployed. This enables Silicon One-based products to support emerging use cases and play multiple network roles, protecting long-term infrastructure investments. And with security fused into the hardware, customers can embrace holistic, at-speed security to keep clusters up and running.
Cisco Silicon One is the industry’s most scalable and programmable unified networking architecture, offering a complete portfolio of networking devices across AI, hyperscaler, data center, enterprise, and service provider use cases. Introduced in 2019, Cisco Silicon One is playing critical roles in major networks around the world.
New Systems, Optics: High-Density, Scalable Design for Power-Efficiency and Performance
To enable AI network builders of all sizes – hyperscale to enterprise – Cisco is introducing the next generation of Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 fixed and modular Ethernet systems, powered by Silicon One, and designed for the extreme power and thermal demands of AI workloads. Cisco is also introducing innovative optics that unlock even higher efficiency and greater reliability. These advancements deliver a major leap forward in power-efficient, high-performance AI infrastructure.
Cisco N9000 and Cisco 8000 102.4T Systems: powered by Silicon One G300, deliver a new standard in data center performance and efficiency with liquid-cooled and air-cooled designs. The 100% liquid cooled systems enable significantly higher bandwidth density and achieve a nearly 70% energy efficiency improvement, offering the same bandwidth in a single system that would previously have required 6 prior generation systems.
1.6T OSFP (Octal Small Form-factor Pluggable) Optics: 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.
800G Linear Pluggable Optics (LPO): driving greater efficiency for AI scale out networks, 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 30%, leading to more reliable and sustainable operations.
Expanded Portfolio of Silicon One P200-powered Systems: building on the introduction of 51.2T systems for hyperscale deployments, 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: Intelligent AI networking to drive AI infrastructure forward
Organizations need greater flexibility in where and how they run AI workloads. To address the diverse requirements of these environments, Cisco is advancing Nexus One with a unified management plane that brings together silicon, systems, optics, software, and programmable intelligence as a single integrated solution. We're also introducing AgenticOps for data center networking through AI Canvas — making it easier to troubleshoot through guided, human-in-the-loop conversations that turn complex issues into actionable resolutions. Key capabilities include:
Unified Fabric: 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 customization are built-in.
AI Job Observability and Native Splunk Platform Integration: Nexus One delivers job-aware, network-to-GPU visibility that correlates network telemetry with AI workload behavior. 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.
Cisco’s flexible and integrated approach enables more choice, stronger security, and deeper observability—making upgrades and innovation easier, regardless of where customers begin their AI journey.
Source: https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m02/cisco-announces-new-silicon-one-g300.html
