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Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) has teamed up with a slate of artificial intelligence startups to launch a $1B global AI investment fund to strengthen the startup ecosystem and develop reliable AI solutions.
Startup partners include Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI. Cisco has already committed $200M to the fund, the company announced today from its Cisco Live event in Las Vegas.
“Our recent investments in generative AI companies align perfectly with this long-standing strategy,” said Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Mark Patterson.
“In addition to building essential technology to connect, secure and advance AI, Cisco is committed to investing in the broader AI ecosystem to more effectively meet our customers’ needs,” he added.
Cisco has expanded its AI portfolio over the past few years, acquiring or investing in more than 20 AI-focused endeavors.
Cisco also announced a new partnership with Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) to build what it calls the Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI clusters. These are intended to simplify the deployment of generative AI applications.
“Generative AI requires purpose-built infrastructure and software that enables enterprises to securely turn their data into fuel for business transformation,” said Nvidia’s Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking. “NVIDIA and Cisco are providing an enterprise-ready AI platform and control plane to simplify deployment of the accelerated computing, networking and software needed for generative AI workloads.”
The clusters provide an on-premise solution for gen-AI, while also providing cloud management capabilities for customers. Cisco plans to release a trial version of this product during the fourth quarter of 2024.
Cisco also announced new security offerings, including an AI-native management architecture, Security Cloud Control, that will configure, manage and monitor the entire Cisco cloud system, the Cisco Firewall 1200 Series and a new version of Firewall Threat Defense.
Finally, Cisco revealed a new partnership with tech giant Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) “to bring browser-based threat and data protection from Chrome Enterprise to web apps secured by Cisco Secure Access.”
