Hyperscalers lead product growth  

Led by hyperscalers, Cisco’s total product orders grew 35% year over year.

The year-to-date total of $5.3 billion in orders taken from hyperscalers already exceeds its fiscal year 2026 expectations of $5 billion, with a full quarter remaining.

Robbins said hyperscalers totaled $1.9 billion, up from $600 million in the year prior, “with strong growth across our Silicon One systems and market-leading Acacia Optics.”

But Cisco’s third-quarter results weren’t only about the hyperscalers.

Outside of hyperscalers, Cisco’s product orders rose 19% year-over-year, demonstrating what the company said was continued broad-based demand it sees for its technology globally.

Given the strong demand, we now expect to take AI infrastructure orders of approximately $9 billion from hyperscalers in fiscal year 2026, which is 4.5x its fiscal year 2025 total.

“We expect to recognize approximately $4 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscalers in fiscal year 2026,” Robbins said.

Service provider and cloud growth

In terms of customer markets, Cisco’s growth was led by triple-digit growth in the Service Provider and Cloud segments. Cisco also saw strength in the public sector and enterprise, which were up 27% and 18%, respectively.

From a product perspective. Networking product orders continue to accelerate, growing more than 50% in the third quarter, driven by triple-digit growth in service provider routing and compute and double-digit growth in data center switching, campus switching, wireless, enterprise routing, and industrial IoT products.

Product orders from service providers and cloud customers accelerated in the third quarter, growing 105% year-over-year with 5 of the top hyperscalers each growing in triple digits.

Cisco also saw solid growth from telco customers in the third quarter, with orders up 9%. “Telcos are investing in Cisco technology as they prepare their networks to handle the scale, speed, and complexity of AI,” Robbins said.

Data center, routing drive revenues

Driven by gains in data center and routing products, Cisco’s third-quarter revenue was $15.8 billion, up 12% year-over-year, coming in at the end of the company’s guidance.

Product revenue was $12.1 billion, up 17%, while services revenue was $3.7 billion, down 1% year-over-year, mainly due to the timing of service contract start dates, the company said.

“Product revenue growth was led by networking, with growth accelerating to 25% year-over-year, driven by AI infrastructure and campus refresh,” said Mark Patterson, CFO of Cisco. “We saw growth across the portfolio, led by double-digit growth in campus switching, data center switching, wireless and service provider routing.

The rest of Cisco’s portfolio was a bit of a mixed bag. Security was flat, with growth in new and refreshed products continuing to be offset by declines in earlier-generation products and by the transition of its Splunk business from on-premises deals to cloud subscriptions. Likewise, collaboration dipped 1% with declines in Webex, partially offset by growth in devices.

All geographic segments saw double-digit, accelerating product order growth, with the Americas up 35%, EMEA up 39%, and APJC up 25%.

Patterson said for fiscal Q4, Cisco “expects revenue to be in the range of $16.7 billion to $16.9 billion.”

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