On February 24, 2026, Red Hat announced a new collaboration with NVIDIA to provide a co-engineered software platform for AI factories. Building on this momentum, we are pleased to announce that Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA now has an expanded choice of tooling for AI practitioners to accelerate AI application delivery. This is enabled through the support for Red Hat AI Factory software. This combination of NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Red Hat AI Enterprise software helps simplify the development of next-generation agentic workloads by providing a single, integrated AI factory stack. Unlike other solutions that treat security as an afterthought, Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA provides a uniquely integrated, security-first foundation. By fusing security and observability directly into the network and every layer of the stack, we ensure that production-ready innovation is not just scalable but inherently protected from the core to the edge.

Scaling these production-ready workloads from an initial pilot to a global enterprise rollout requires a foundation of high-performing, resilient infrastructure. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA provides this essential platform, ensuring that every component (from Cisco accelerated compute and networking to security and observability, to the Red Hat and NVIDIA AI software) operates with the reliability and speed necessary for production-grade AI. By providing this industrial-scale solution, we enable organizations to move beyond experimentation and confidently scale their AI initiatives across the enterprise.

Figure 1. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA and Red Hat provides expanded choice of tooling for AI practitioners to accelerate AI apps delivery

The foundation: Strategic engineering alignment

So how do you transform from AI experimentation to becoming a genuinely "AI-fueled" enterprise? It starts with your infrastructure. Cisco brings the high-performance networking fabric, accelerated compute nodes, and integrated security architecture you need to handle the massive data throughput of modern AI clusters. Our leadership stems from deep, strategic engineering alignment with Red Hat and NVIDIA, ensuring that Cisco UCS and Nexus infrastructure work seamlessly with the Red Hat AI Factory with NVIDIA software stack.

By supporting Red Hat AI Factory software as an option, we have expanded customer choice of AI software in our streamlined solution with a co-engineered software platform for AI factories. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA infrastructure comes pre-validated to run the industry's leading enterprise Linux and MLOps software, allowing IT teams to deploy with confidence and AI practitioners to start working immediately.

Establishing operational rigor for AI practitioners

This engineering alignment between Red Hat and NVIDIA tackles the most persistent roadblock to enterprise AI adoption: production delivery friction. For AI practitioners, this means moving beyond experimental silos and into a unified, high-performance environment. Red Hat AI Enterprise and NVIDIA AI Enterprise provide the software tools to manage the AI/ML lifecycle at scale. The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for NVIDIA offers a specialized, validated operating foundation, and the true value is realized by Cisco, Red Hat, and NVIDIA coming together to accelerate enterprise AI with Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA.

By upstreaming proprietary drivers and GPU operators directly into the RHEL ecosystem, Red Hat and NVIDIA have eliminated the need for manual remediation. For Cisco customers, this software-level integration finds its perfect home on Cisco AI PODs. Our engineering ensures that these AI clusters can be deployed, governed, and operated with the same rigor, security, and predictability as your core enterprise IT platforms.

When you layer this co-engineered software stack onto Cisco unified compute and high-performance networking fabric, the "infrastructure tax" disappears. With Cisco Intersight providing intelligent, cloud-based management, IT teams can simplify operations across data center and edge environments, ensuring consistent performance regardless of location. This allows data scientists to stop troubleshooting driver versions or interconnect bottlenecks and start focusing on model accuracy and business impact. With the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, we aren't just giving you the tools to build AI; we're providing the industrial-grade foundation to run it with confidence.

Accelerating the path to agentic AI

While operational stability lays the groundwork, you also need to overcome the complexity that often stalls deployment speed. In today's market, speed is a competitive necessity. Red Hat simplifies software acquisition and deployment through a new, streamlined licensing model. By combining Red Hat AI Enterprise with NVIDIA AI Enterprise (available through Cisco) in a unified AI Factory software platform, Red Hat and NVIDIA have made high-end MLOps economically accessible. This unified procurement through Cisco further simplifies the path to production by providing a single point of contact for both your infrastructure and the AI software stack.

What's more, Cisco customers gain instant access to pre-configured models, including the IBM Granite family and NVIDIA Nemotron, delivered as NVIDIA NIM microservices. With Red Hat AI Factory software now supported by Cisco, AI practitioners can skip the complicated setup phase and jump straight to fine-tuning and inference, significantly reducing time to value for next-generation physical and agentic AI applications.

Unparalleled hybrid cloud flexibility

As you accelerate these deployments, where you run your workloads becomes a critical strategic decision. Does your AI strategy require the scale of the public cloud, the security of an on-premises data center, or the low latency of the edge? With Cisco support for Red Hat AI Factory software, the answer is "all of the above."

Powered by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, this solution provides a consistent operational model across core to the edge. Cisco customers can build and train models on-premises on AI PODs, which form the infrastructure foundation of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, while maintaining the flexibility to deploy those models anywhere. This ensures you maintain full architectural control over your data and models, regardless of where the physical hardware resides.

Security and performance at scale

Maintaining this architectural flexibility across the hybrid cloud requires simultaneous focus on the non-negotiable requirements of enterprise-grade security and performance.

At its core, security cannot be an afterthought. Siloed tools and fragmented enforcement leave gaps, exposing AI environments to threats like model poisoning, prompt injection, and data exfiltration. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is built differently; security is engineered into every layer of the stack consistently from core to edge. Cisco AI Defense, integrated with NVIDIA AI, protects AI models and applications from development to runtime-ensuring every inference is trusted and safeguarded against prompt injection, harmful output, and data privacy risks. Cisco Isovalent delivers runtime security for containerized AI workloads on Kubernetes, preventing lateral movement through identity-based, kernel-level enforcement using eBPF technology, without impacting performance. This security extends to the infrastructure, with consistent policy enforcement through Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Cisco Security Cloud Control, while Cisco Splunk Enterprise Security provides built-in threat detection and response. This is security engineered into the AI Factory, not bolted on.

Complementing this is Splunk Observability Cloud's Observability for AI, which delivers unified visibility across the Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA to monitor performance, quality, security, and cost. With AI Infrastructure Monitoring, teams gain real-time insights into the health, availability, and resource utilization (e.g., GPU, power, network, nodes) of Cisco AI PODs, ensuring cost attribution and optimization. AI Agent Monitoring tracks LLM and agentic applications for hallucinations, biases, and semantic quality, while detecting AI privacy risks through integration with Cisco AI Defense. These real-time insights empower proactive root cause analysis and rapid issue resolution to improve the efficiency, reliability, and security of the entire AI stack.

The road ahead

By combining the robust infrastructure from Cisco with the innovative AI software stacks from Red Hat and NVIDIA, we're turning the promise of AI into a mission-critical reality for every enterprise. This lets you accelerate the delivery of trusted agentic and physical AI applications with scalable, high-performance, and secure infrastructure.

Contact your Cisco account representative today to schedule a strategy session on Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. Together, we can assess your infrastructure readiness and chart a path toward industrial-scale AI production.

Schedule a strategy session on Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA