Cisco will consider India for fabless semicon: CEO Chuck Robbins

As Cisco's first plant in Tamil Nadu gets up and running marking its first foray into manufacturing in this geography, the company has indicated that this could well lead to plans for a bigger footprint. With the centre’s recent push on making India into a semiconductor hub and several companies exploring joint ventures with Indian entities for instance, the Tata-PSMC and Micron’s announcement to set up a Semicon facility, Cisco says it would be open to considering India as a destination. Being a fabless company, “On the silicon front we design incredibly advanced silicon, and I think the early fabs that are moving into India are quite advanced enough to build those. We are absolutely looking for increased capacity and when that is available, we will absolutely consider it,” Chuck told Fortune India.

The company has been investing heavily in AI which includes AI networking for the cloud, AI infrastructure, silicon and cyber. Earlier this year, Cisco completed the acquisition of Splunk, a software company that helps with data/business/cyber tools, paying nearly $28 billion to enhance its AI offering experience. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer who till recently was General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco said the company’s investments into AI are on multiple fronts.

“One is making sure that our products are AI native from a security standpoint, so new products that we are building are easy to manage through our natural language interface with our AI assistant,” he said.

What that would mean is that its customers could use English sentences to give commands to even perform complex functions. However, where Cisco sees a bigger opportunity in the coming days is in securing AI itself. With thousands of applications being built by people/companies across the world, any product/solution that could be a common security layer which can go across all of those would become important. "You should expect us to have a lot of innovation in that area both in the build time and the run time for security. So, think about it as guard rails that can be put in place for security so whenever there is an app built by you as a developer or company, you don't have to worry about what guardrail it has," Jeetu adds.

In a recent earnings call of the company, Cisco's leadership said that it had $1 billion in AI orders with web-scale customers to date and three out of the top four hyperscalers deploying Cisco’s Ethernet AI fabric and expects an additional $1 billion in AI product orders in FY25. This shift in focus has also resulted in workforce restructuring. Recently the company announced a 7% reduction in its global workforce. According to reports, while the first round of layoffs in 2024 saw nearly 4000 being affected, the recent announcement is estimated to affect over 5000 people. With the demand being robust and asserting the need for restructuring, “I thought we needed some changes, and we really needed to shift some investments pretty significantly into cyber security as well as artificial intelligence networking and infrastructure for AI and some others and that was what it was in general,” Chuck said.