Cisco aims to become an AI avenger with $1B fund

• Cisco unveiled a new $1 billion AI fund at Cisco Live this week
• The company teamed with Nvidia to offer a new HyperFabric for AI clusters in data centers
• Cisco also trotted out a series of security updates at the show

CISCO LIVE, LAS VEGAS – Cisco placed a $1 billion bet on artificial intelligence (AI) on Tuesday, announcing a new investment fund designed to boost AI startups and accelerate AI innovation around the globe.

The company said it has already allocated $200 million from the fund, having made investments in startups including Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI.

Cohere specializes in security-focused large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology. France-based Mistral – which has also secured investments from Microsoft and Databricks, among others – is focused on generative AI, while U.S.- based Scale AI offers a platform for training and validating AI applications.

Cloud hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud have been leading the charge on AI investments, but that hasn’t stopped others from getting in on the action. IBM, for instance, launched a $500 million Enterprise AI Venture Fund in November to aid startups focused on enterprise applications. That same month, HPE backed German LLM startup Aleph Alpha was part of a $500 million funding round. Databricks launched its own AI Fund last month, but didn’t attach a dollar figure to the effort.

Zooming out

There are two big problems with these efforts, however, at least from a U.S. perspective. First, they’re not focused squarely on funding AI startups in the U.S. specifically. And two, they positively pale in comparison to AI investments being made by foreign governments.

Indeed, the World Economic Forum noted in May the U.S. and China are two of five global powers investing to create AI ecosystems, the others being India, Germany and Japan. It pointed out, however, that investment strategies differ between these countries, with the U.S. taking a more market-driven approach while China’s government is spearheading its efforts.

China, for example, just launched a $47.5 billion fund that will most likely focus on developing chips for AI and is already several years into its national AI development plan (which was unveiled in 2017). And Chinese cloud giants like Alibaba are throwing their weight behind domestic AI startups as well.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is reportedly eyeing the creation of a $40 billion AI fund of its own and powerhouse companies based in the country are placing bets on Chinese AI startups.

Suffice to say if the U.S. and China are planning to battle it out for AI dominance, China has both a headstart and more concentrated monetary firepower in its arsenal.

Other news

The Cisco’s new investment fund was just one of several headlines to come out of Day 1 of Cisco Live.

Other major highlights included the launch of Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI, a networking product designed with Nvidia to simplify deployment of AI clusters within data centers; AI innovations for Cisco ThousandEyes to enable better visibility and assurance within public and on-premises cloud environments; and a series of security-focused updates. These updates include Cisco Hypershield support for AMD DPUs, the debut of the Cisco Firewall 1200 Series and Cisco Security Cloud Control, and the release of version 7.6 of Firewall Threat Defense.

Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI comprises Cisco’s Nexus 6000 switches, optics and cloud management capabilities as well as Nvidia enterprise AI software, NIM inference microservices, Tensor Core GPUs (initially starting with the H200), BlueField-3 data processing and reference designs for AI built on Nvidia MGX.

The fabric will be available for early access trials in Q4 of this year.

We’ve got folks on the ground covering the show in Las Vegas, so stay tuned for more exclusive insights from Cisco Live!