Cisco and Nvidia are expanding cooperation on an "AI Factory" initiative.

The companies said on March 16 local time they upgraded "Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia" with a focus on moving beyond a data centre-centric setup to cover edge environments and telecom operator infrastructure.

Cisco first introduced the solution at Nvidia's annual GTC conference last year and later added features several times, including the launch of the N9100 switch equipped with a Spectrum-X Ethernet chip. It has now carried out the first large-scale update.

The expansion reflects rising demand for inference workloads. Cisco added support for Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs in this update. Cisco UCS and its unified edge portfolio now support RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.

Cisco introduced "Cisco AI Grid with Nvidia" as part of its push into the telecom operator edge market. The solution is a reference design that combines a mobility service platform with Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell series GPUs, supporting telecom operators in providing edge AI services through their networks.

Security functions were also strengthened. As security requirements for AI agents rise, Cisco integrated AI Defense with Nvidia NeMo Guardrails. It said this enables secure communication between agents running at the edge and agents running in the data centre core. It added that it also expanded the scope of its hybrid mesh firewall to Nvidia BlueField DPUs (data processing units).