Cisco took $4 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026, the company reported on August 12, 2026, capping a year in which orders for AI networking gear more than tripled from what it expected nine months ago. The orders number landed inside a quarterly earnings release that otherwise reads like a legacy networking vendor’s best-case scenario: revenue of $17.3 billion, up 18% year over year, product orders up 35%, and networking product orders up 40% for an eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.
For the full fiscal year, which ended July 25, 2026, Cisco reported revenue of $63.3 billion, up 12%, with non-GAAP earnings of $4.33 per share. The company guided fiscal 2027 revenue to between $72.2 billion and $73.4 billion, a range whose midpoint implies roughly 15% growth, and told investors to expect $7.5 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers in the coming year, against approximately $4 billion delivered in fiscal 2026.
“We delivered a very strong close to fiscal 2026, marking another record year for Cisco,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s chair and CEO, in the release. “With the breadth and depth of our portfolio and our competitive differentiation in secure networking, Cisco is well positioned to support our customers however or wherever they decide to deploy AI.”
The $4 billion quarterly AI orders figure is the one that matters for anyone tracking where hyperscaler capex actually lands. Cisco’s networking revenue, $9.8 billion in the quarter, up 28%, is the clearest public read on how much of the AI buildout is flowing into the switching and routing layer that connects GPU clusters, rather than into the accelerators themselves. The company described demand as a “networking supercycle,” and the order book backs the phrasing: total product orders rose 35% year over year, and even stripping out hyperscalers entirely, orders grew 25% with double-digit growth in every geography and customer market.
Cisco’s AI Order Book Grew Sevenfold in Nine Months
The trajectory inside Cisco’s own disclosures shows how fast the hyperscaler networking business has scaled. In its first-quarter report on November 12, 2025, the company disclosed $1.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers and was guiding toward roughly $3 billion for the fiscal year. By the second quarter on February 11, 2026, the quarterly figure had reached $2.1 billion. The third quarter on May 13, 2026 brought $5.3 billion in orders year to date and a raised full-year target of $9 billion, up from an earlier $5 billion.
The final tally of $9.3 billion for fiscal 2026 cleared even that raised bar. And the revenue line is now catching up to the order book: Cisco expects hyperscaler AI revenue of $7.5 billion in fiscal 2027, which would nearly double the roughly $4 billion it recognized this year. Orders running at $4 billion per quarter against $7.5 billion of expected annual revenue implies a book-to-bill well above one in this segment, meaning Cisco is building backlog in AI networking faster than it can ship it.
That dynamic is familiar to anyone who watched NVIDIA’s data-center franchise turn networking into its own growth engine. Cisco’s version of the story runs through Ethernet, and the buyers are the hyperscalers whose orders drove Cisco’s AI infrastructure book from $1.3 billion in Q1 to $4 billion in Q4. The buildout has pulled power infrastructure along with it, from engine orders for gigawatt-scale campuses to the financing structures now assembling around third-party capital for AI compute.
The Rest of the Business Is Riding the Same Cycle
Beneath the AI headline, Cisco’s quarter showed broad strength rather than a one-segment spike. Security revenue grew 14% to $2.2 billion, collaboration grew 12% to $1.2 billion, and observability grew 6% to $275 million, while services revenue of $3.8 billion was flat. GAAP operating margin reached 24.7% and non-GAAP operating margin 35.9%. Remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue Cisco has yet to recognize, stood at $46.7 billion, up 7% year over year, with product RPO up 9%.
The company also closed two small acquisitions in the quarter: Galileo Technologies, an observability company, and Astrix Securities, a security firm focused on non-human identity, the category covering the machine credentials and service accounts that AI agents increasingly operate under. In the quarter Cisco returned $3.2 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends and declared a quarterly dividend of $0.42 per share payable October 21, 2026.
Cisco’s guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2027 calls for revenue of $18.0 billion to $18.2 billion, which would be another step up from the $17.3 billion just reported. The full-year range of $72.2 billion to $73.4 billion, if the midpoint holds, would make fiscal 2027 the company’s fastest-growing year in the current cycle, on the back of a networking franchise that is now, by its own order book, one of the largest picks-and-shovels suppliers to the AI buildout.
