TLDR: Cisco, in partnership with NVIDIA and VAST Data, has launched a new AI infrastructure solution designed to empower enterprises with secure, scalable agentic AI. This collaboration, featuring the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA and VAST InsightEngine, aims to accelerate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and enable AI agents to deliver real-time, contextualized business outcomes.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 4, 2025 – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a significant advancement in artificial intelligence infrastructure, unveiling a new solution developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and VAST Data. This integrated architecture, dubbed the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, is specifically engineered to support workload data fabrics, enabling enterprises to securely leverage their proprietary data for agentic AI at an unprecedented scale.
The core of this new offering is its ability to accelerate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, drastically reducing data extraction and retrieval latency from minutes to mere seconds. This ensures that AI agents have immediate, secure access to the critical information they need, precisely when required. The solution integrates Cisco AI PODs, which utilize the VAST InsightEngine, to provide an NVIDIA AI Data Platform solution, establishing real-time data pipelines essential for the Secure AI Factory.
Jeremy Foster, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Compute, emphasized the transformative potential, stating, “Agentic AI has the potential to unlock the value of AI for enterprises around the world. Moving beyond chatbots to agents that can help solve true business challenges is revolutionary, but only if enterprises can effectively leverage the right data at the right times. Cisco, NVIDIA and VAST are working together to give customers a simple path to unlocking the value of their data.” He added, “We are designing the architecture for how the enterprise will build the next generation of AI factories.”
Justin Boitano, Vice President, Enterprise AI at NVIDIA, highlighted the role of enterprise data in this new era. “The next wave of agentic AI will be fueled by enterprise data, enabling agents to tap into business knowledge during inference for precise, up-to-date insights,” Boitano said. “Bringing together Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA and VAST InsightEngine creates an integrated platform for running powerful AI agents at scale.”
VAST Data is the first vendor to integrate with Cisco AI PODs, offering enterprise customers an NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design. This collaboration promises several key benefits:
Faster Time to Insights: By reducing RAG pipeline latency, the solution enables near-real-time AI responses.
Agentic AI at Enterprise Scale: AI agents can operate continuously, learn dynamically, and deliver contextualized business outcomes. The architecture is designed for high data throughput, unlocking multi-step reasoning and supporting multiple agents and workloads simultaneously.
Enhanced Security: The Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA extends its capabilities to keep every token secure with AI Defense, addressing a variety of use cases to speed enterprise AI adoption.
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This validated architecture represents a significant step towards modernizing data centers for the AI era, providing a robust and secure foundation for AI agents built with open models and ensuring end-to-end visibility across networks, GPUs, and distributed AI jobs.
