Cisco, NVIDIA and WWT bring Cloud Scale AI Factory to Market
In February of 2025 Cisco published a press release about their new partnership with NVIDIA to integrate with the NVIDIA SpectrumTM-X Ethernet ecosystem. The partner and customer community eagerly waited to see what would happen and when. The second bullet point of that press release talked about Nexus 9300 Series switches (based on Cisco Silicon One ASICs) being coupled with the NVIDIA Ethernet SuperNICs to support NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet features. We were excited to learn that this capability was released on August 13th, 2025 in NX-OS 10.6(1) Fusing adaptive routing with packet spraying and reordering
The third bullet point is what really piqued my interest. Cisco stated they were going to release a switch based on NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet silicon running a Cisco operating system. How long would we have to wait for this creation? That was answered last week at GTC in Washington, DC. Cisco has officially announced the Cisco N9100 switch platform, to bring cloud scale AI Factories to market for neocloud and sovereign cloud deployments.
The Cisco N9100 is a 64-port 800Gb switch utilizing a 51.2Tb NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet switch ASIC, capable of running the Cisco NXOS Operating System or SONiC. People may wonder how this is different than the Nexus 9364E-SG2 series, or why Cisco would create a new line of switches like this. Let's dig into the how and why.
The Cisco N9100E-NS4-O has 64 ports of 800GE like the Nexus 9364E-SG2, but it only comes in an OSFP flavor, whereas the Nexus 9364E-SG2 supports QSFP-DD and OSFP. I don't see that as a major roadblock as most AI switching and endpoint platforms have a wide range of OSFP optics, where QSFP-DD isn't always as straight forward for 400 and 800GE speeds. Another difference is that the Cisco N9100 will support up to 256 ports of 100GE, whereas the Nexus 9364E-SG2 can support up to 512 100GE ports. This doesn't mean the Cisco N9100 is physically smaller or less capable. It just doesn't support breaking it down to that many virtual ports. The reality is, I haven't seen many situations where a customer would require more than 256 100GE ports in today's AI networks. Most are implementing 200, 400, or 800GE connections. We mentioned earlier about the phase 1 integration of adaptive routing. In this case, adaptive routing is natively integrated into the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet switch ASIC. This should help reduce customer concerns about how closely the Cisco N9100 and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet integration conforms to the NVIDIA reference designs. The Cisco N9100 launch announcement states that the Cisco N9100 is a third-party switching platform based on the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) reference design. Cisco also has its Cisco Cloud Reference Architecture which is based on the tenets of the NCP reference design. This gives you the ultimate flexibility and choice while still living under the same management umbrella of Nexus Dashboard. Lastly, the Cisco N9100 will be targeted at neocloud and sovereign cloud deployments, whereas the Nexus 9364E-SG2 is targeted at the same but expands into their overall data center ecosystem.
The biggest benefit I see with the Cisco N9100 will be that organizations that have Cisco networks today will not need to significantly change their operational models to support this platform. Changing from one network operating system to another for AI networks has caused pushback in some enterprise environments due to the drastic change in existing operating and security models. The Cisco N9100 will help reduce this challenge significantly. In fact, Cisco Nexus Dashboard will support the management of the Cisco N9100 fabrics.
In summary, the Cisco N9100 is a fantastic new switch targeted at bringing cloud scale AI Factories to neocloud and sovereign cloud deployments. It has an NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet switch ASIC at its heart and soul with all the goodness of NX-OS running on top of the ASIC and managed by Nexus Dashboard. All of this wrapped together makes for the first third-party switch to be supported and based on the NVIDIA NCP reference design. Cisco was listening to customer and partner feedback with this switch. WWT is looking forward to testing in our AI Proving Ground, and you can expect a report to follow!