Cisco beats on earnings, says AI infrastructure revenue will double this fiscal year

The robust financial performance underscores the company’s aggressive push to capture market share in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence ecosystem. Cisco, traditionally known as a dominant supplier of enterprise networking hardware, routers, and switches, has been working diligently to establish a formidable foothold in the artificial intelligence buildout after missing out on the early years of the generative AI boom.

According to the company’s financial statement, revenue increased 24% from $14.88 billion a year earlier. Net income saw an even more dramatic increase, rising to $4.6 billion, or $1.14 per share, up significantly from $2.9 billion, or 72 cents per share, during the same period a year ago. These figures comfortably surpassed the consensus estimates compiled by LSEG, triggering positive momentum for the stock in after-hours trading.

The market has increasingly rewarded Cisco for its strategic pivot toward high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting modern artificial intelligence workloads. The company’s stock price has risen about 35% this year as of Thursday’s close, significantly outperforming the broader market and trouncing the Nasdaq, which has gained roughly 9% over that same stretch. Investors are growing more confident that Cisco’s traditional enterprise customer base, combined with massive data center deployments, will fuel long-term corporate growth.

A key driver of this optimism is the company’s rapidly accelerating artificial intelligence pipeline. Cisco raised its expectation for AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers to $9 billion this fiscal year, an impressive projection that represents more than double the figure recorded in fiscal 2026. This upward revision highlights the sheer scale of demand from major cloud service providers and enterprise data centers that are racing to upgrade their hardware to handle increasingly complex machine learning models.

Chief Executive Officer Chuck Robbins emphasized the company’s evolving role in the enterprise technology landscape during this transitional era. Organizations are increasingly turning to Cisco for trusted, market-defining technology and deep engineering expertise to help them scale, secure, and optimize their digital environments for the emerging agentic AI era, Robbins noted in the official earnings statement. As enterprises transition from basic experimentation to deploying autonomous agents and resource-intensive AI workflows, the underlying network infrastructure must evolve to handle unprecedented volumes of data with ultra-low latency and heightened security.

Building on this momentum, Cisco issued an optimistic financial forecast for the upcoming period. For the fiscal second quarter, the company said it expects revenue to land between $18 billion and $18.2 billion, easily topping the average analyst estimate of $17.88 billion, according to data from LSEG. Additionally, Cisco is projecting adjusted earnings per share of $1.34 to $1.36 for the second quarter, which also beats the $1.23 average estimate anticipated by Wall Street analysts. This forward-looking guidance reflects management’s confidence in sustained order momentum, supply chain stability, and robust enterprise spending on next-generation networking and security solutions as the fiscal year progresses.