Pod Insights Decoder Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space About this episode My guest today is Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. Cisco is one of those big companies that everyone has heard of but most of us don’t have to interact with very much; they’re not really a consumer brand. But without Cisco's actual routers and switches and silicon — and the software to make those things work — there’s no internet, no cloud, and no AI.
But a data center is a really unpleasant neighbor to have, and there’s robust opposition to new data center builds all over the country. So I had to start by asking what feels, strangely, like one of the most urgent questions of the moment: Should we build data centers in space?
Links:
Nvidia launches space computing, rocketing AI Into orbit | Nvidia
Nvidia’s AI dominance expands to networking | CRN
Amid rising pushback, 2025 data center cancellations surge | Heatmap
Billionaires want data centers everywhere, including space | The Verge
How Ciena keeps the internet online | Decoder
Okta’s CEO is betting big on agent identity | Decoder
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Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.
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Transcript 12,323 words · 13 speakers
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1:37 Speaker 03 Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco. Cisco is one of those big companies that everyone has heard of, but most of us don't have to interact with very much. This is not really a consumer brand. But all of us are in some way using Cisco's products and services every day, because Cisco makes a huge amount of networking equipment for other big companies like telecoms and ISPs. It's a lock that somewhere between me recording this and you listening to it, that the bits have passed through Cisco's products. Without the actual routers and switches and silicon and the software to make those things work, there's no internet, there's no cloud, and there's no AI. That's Cisco's big new business, of course, building all of the networking needed inside
2:22 Speaker 03 all of the data centers that the AI companies are trying to build. And of course Chuck and I spend a lot of time talking about that. Most importantly, I wanted to know where he thinks we should build all of these new data centers, because it's not clear that anyone really wants them around. A data center is fundamentally an unpleasant neighbor to have. They're loud, they're ugly, and they use a lot of electricity, making rates where regular people go up. And now AI itself is pulling pretty badly across America, so there's fairly robust bipartisan opposition to new data center builds all over the country. So of course, I asked Chuck the obvious first question: Should we build data centers in space? Elon Musk obviously seems to think so, and he's pushing SpaceX in that direction, promising a million data centers in space.
3:04 Speaker 03 On the other hand, Sam Altman, along with a whole bunch of experts who understand space, well, they think we're not there yet. So I asked Chuck which way he's leading, and I think you'll be a little surprised at how quickly and emphatically he answered. You'll also hear me ask very directly whether Chuck thinks AI is a bubble, and you'll hear him say very directly that he thinks it is. And he would know: During the dot-com bubble, Cisco, which builds networks, was briefly the most valuable company in the world. Chuck has seen a lot of ups and downs. But while AI is in the news, one of my favorite things to do on Decoder is bring big companies that are kind of hidden in plain sight out into the open. Cisco is a perfect example. Chuck has made some big bets around chip investments and positioning Cisco on what he calls "the leading edge, but not the bleeding edge."
3:48 Speaker 03 That's really fascinating when you think about the kind of infrastructure that he sells to companies all over the world. These companies are dealing with an increasingly fractured global landscape, and those companies and their governments are asking big questions about who owns data, where it can be stored. Whether the internet in all those countries should have independent kill switches. Those are all important questions that are being asked every day, and they don't have easy answers. You'll hear Chuck really dive into how complicated it is, keeping the world connected in the deeply weird reality of 2026. Okay, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. Here we go.
4:32 Speaker 03 Chuck Robbins, you're the CEO of Cisco. Welcome to Decoder.
4:34 Speaker 04 It's great to be here. Thank you.
4:35 Speaker 03 I'm excited that you're here in person. I have a lot of questions for you. It seems like a very complicated time to run an infrastructure company, which is fundamentally what Cisco is, especially an infrastructure company for global infrastructure. Like, the internet's a global network, and that seems under a lot of pressure from a lot of different directions. So I want to get into a lot of things with you. But I actually want to start with just a question I've been dying to ask you. Ever since we scheduled this interview, I thought, finally, I can ask this question, and someone will be able to tell me the answer. Should we put data centers in space?
5:06 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And we will.
5:08 Speaker 03 You think so?
5:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think so. You're, you know, right now, we're dealing with lots of power constraints. And up there, you don't have that. And if you think about the people who are talking about putting data centers in space, I wouldn't doubt them. So.
5:21 Speaker 03 So Elon.
5:22 Speaker 04 Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of stuff we're working on right now. We're thinking through relative to what we need to do to our portfolio to make it work properly in the conditions that might exist up there. But no, I think we're going to see it.
5:36 Speaker 03 Elon's plan, he recently filed for approval for this plan is to launch a million satellites, part of a constellation. Obviously, he's launched constellations before. You mentioning power, that's obviously solar.
5:48 Speaker 04 Yep.
5:49 Speaker 03 Can't we just do solar power here on Earth? Is that not a possibility?
5:52 Speaker 04 Well, I think up there, you have unlimited, unimpeded. And so it's, it's just easier. You don't have to deal with a lot of the challenges that people, where people don't want these data centers in their communities or near them. So that's obviously off the table. I think it solves a lot of problems. There's a lot of challenges figuring out how to make it all happen.
6:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:10 Speaker 04 But given his history, I wouldn't doubt him. And we're going to prepare to, to have our technology ready.
6:17 Speaker 03 What does that preparation look like for you?
6:18 Speaker 04 Well, it's very early stages right now. Our teams came to me, literally, I think it was about two or three months ago, my head of product came and said, we really have to be prepared for data centers in space. And I looked at him like he was crazy. We don't even know everything we need to do yet, but we're in the early stages of just making sure the atmospheric issues, the temperatures, I mean, all those things will have to be taken into consideration. But at some level, you don't have to, we don't have to deal with all the cooling and things of that nature, which add a lot of weight to the product because you first start thinking about how do we get them up there. And so there's, there's a lot of things that our team's thinking through right now.
6:54 Speaker 03 What does that networking stack look like for you? Do you have to invent a whole bunch of new stuff? Is it the same stuff in it without as many cooling loads or with less?
7:01 Speaker 04 I think it's generally the same with, with perhaps different interfaces for different satellite technology, things like that, but shouldn't be too dissimilar.
7:08 Speaker 03 Do you want to be on the, on the bleeding edge of that or you wait and see if Elon can prove it out?
7:12 Speaker 04 No, I'd like to be on the front, the leading edge. How about we say that?
7:16 Speaker 03 Makes sense.
7:17 Speaker 04 Maybe not bleed, but let's lead.
7:18 Speaker 03 What does that investment look like for you? Are you going to set up a team?
7:21 Speaker 04 The teams that currently build our data centers are the logical ones to actually do this analysis, and I think that's what's, that's what's happening right now.
7:29 Speaker 03 The cooling piece of it, for example, to me seems challenging in a lot of ways, right? You, you have to move the heat out of the products. There's no air in space. That's not going to naturally happen, right? There's like-
7:39 Speaker 04 You're, you're getting way beyond me pretty quickly.
7:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm just curious. Like I, we, we've written a bunch of should we put data centers in space stories now? And I was dying to ask you this question because it feels like someone has to do a lot of basic R and D work to make this happen.
7:52 Speaker 04 I'd say six months from now, have my chief product officer do this with you and he can, he can go through a lot of that with you.
7:56 Speaker 03 Fair enough. Let me ask you the flip side of this. You mentioned this already, there's problems with building data centers in the United States around the world. I want to come to that in more, in more depth. But are we just running away from the problems of politics and saying, we'll just do it in space where there's no one to get in our way?
8:11 Speaker 04 I don't think that's it. I think it just eliminates a lot of the challenges that, that you're facing on, on the planet. And so let me, let me assure you, I grew up on a farm in Georgia, so the last thing I ever thought I'd be talking about are data centers in space.
8:27 Speaker 04 And even five years ago, I wouldn't have thought I'd be talking about it. But if you think about a lot of the dynamics we're dealing with, I don't think it's politics so much as it is a lot of the physical limitations, the community. There is an aspect where a lot of the people in the communities don't want these things in their backyards, and I get that. Sam Altman is one who says immediately, I don't think they should be in their backyards. We got enough rural areas in this country where we ought to be able to put these things.
8:53 Speaker 03 Sam Altman also notably says data centers are the space of the pipe dream. So who are you going to, who you got?
8:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, I wouldn't bet against Elon.
9:00 Speaker 03 All right, fair enough. Let's talk about Cisco for a second. Cisco is, you've been CEO for 11 years, you've been there for almost 30, I want to say. This is a company that goes boom and bust with boom and busts, right? And I think in the dot com era, Cisco was briefly the world's most valuable company.
9:15 Speaker 04 For about a day, I think.
9:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, and this is a company that when it's time to do infrastructure, Cisco can be one of the big growth drivers.
9:22 Speaker 04 Infrastructure's cool again, you know?
9:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's time to build, as they say. What is Cisco to you right now? How would you describe this company?
9:29 Speaker 04 We securely connect everything. I mean, that's basically what we do. We connect systems, we connect people, we connect things, and we do it in a secure way. We're connecting AI data centers, we're connecting GPUs within AI data centers. It's really primarily about secure connectivity.
9:44 Speaker 03 So when you connect everything, I think primarily when people have thought about that, they've thought about, honestly, last mile. Like, you build the big internet, that's an enterprise problem, and then we're going to do 5G, and it's mobile world congress, we're going to do 6G now, who knows what that's going to be. But that's the big internet that people have long thought about. There's, I know you have a big corporate business. The turn for networking right now feels like data centers, right? It feels like we're building these big data centers, we're going to link up a bunch of GPUs in ways we haven't necessarily linked up those GPUs before. We have different kinds of workloads because of AI. Is that a meaningful difference to how you conceive of Cisco?
10:19 Speaker 04 There's certainly more.
10:22 Speaker 04 And faster innovation around things like our silicon that we design ourselves that is going into the data centers. So the data center, the continued evolution of the data centers is forcing us to drive those cycles faster. And if you look at our enterprise data center business, which if you go back to 2010, when the cloud came along, or 2008, or whenever it was, there was a belief that we were never going to sell another, there was never going to be another private data center built. And if you look at the last eight quarters, I think we've had six of the eight, we've had double-digit growth in our enterprise data center networking business. And we had high single digits in the other two quarters. So we see that business growing at the same time that if you go back five or six years, we had relatively zero business
11:07 Speaker 04 from the big hyperscalers. And this year we'll do billions, and most of that's driven by AI infrastructure and their data centers. So I think your assumption is accurate.
11:17 Speaker 03 Is that just a lack of their capacity, right? Amazon or Microsoft wants to build out another data center for themselves and they can't do it themselves because they're building so fast that they're turning to you?
11:28 Speaker 04 No, we're selling them equipment that they're using to build their own data centers. So they're building them.
11:32 Speaker 03 So what was the turn? Why did that line start growing for you when it wasn't growing before?
11:36 Speaker 04 Success in business is always a combination of good decisions and a lot of luck, I think. And so the luck struck in 2016 when one of my engineers who ran our hardware, who built our hardware, came to me and said, there's this silicon company in Israel that I think we should buy. And we had, it gave us the opportunity to standardize on a single silicon architecture across the entire portfolio. So in 2016, we bought this company. It was called Leva. You know, we're one of basically three companies in the world that can build the networking silicon that's needed to connect these GPUs, run the training models, run these AI data centers. And so that was a big part of what's helped us get there. And to be candid, if we didn't have that silicon today, we would not be participating in this phase because otherwise
12:21 Speaker 04 I'd be buying merchant silicon like all my competitors and I'd be just like everybody else. That's the biggest thing that's differentiated us in getting us to this point.
12:30 Speaker 03 We have a lot of competitors or would-be competitors come on the show and talk about networking that seems like a growing business for a class of companies. The one that I'm particularly interested in is Nvidia. You guys have a deep partnership with Nvidia. They just had GTC. You know, Jensen's out there, he's pointing out that their networking business is huge.
12:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:49 Speaker 03 It's bigger than yours in some ways. Their last fiscal year, 31 billion, I think you guys were at 20 billion in the last quarter. It's billions bigger than yours. Is that a threat to you that Nvidia is so deep into building out the networking component? Because they're obviously selling the GPUs.
13:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:05 Speaker 03 There's a place they could go, right? They can just expand their footprint. Is that competition? Is that co-opetition?
13:11 Speaker 04 It's co-opetition. I think in some cases, if you look at the big hyperscalers, they actually build their own integrated architecture using best of breed, whoever they want to use. And they are very good at balancing their spending across multiple vendors. They like to have optionality. They want diversity at the silicon level. That's how they think. You see some NeoClouds as an example. Nvidia sells a fully integrated stack that has networking included in it. And sometimes they'll just, that's a path of least resistance and it helps them get there faster. So sometimes they'll buy that. If you look at the enterprise, most enterprises have built 40 years of knowledge, processes, everything around our platforms and our technology.
13:53 Speaker 04 So that's a big part of why Nvidia values our partnership is what we can do together in the enterprise. And the other thing we have, which no one else has, is security. And so as we move to this agentic era, and you have agents operating all over your infrastructure, you have to do security in the network because the latency requirements are going to require that I'm doing full-time security on these agents all the time. I'm doing access validation, identity validation of agents. And we're the only networking company that has a big security business, and none of our security competitors have a networking business. So it's a big advantage to us as we go forward.
14:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, we just had the CEO of Okta on the show, and his entire pitch was, I will build you a kill switch for your agents.
14:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:43 Speaker 03 Is that something that is competition for you? Is that something that will work alongside what you're planning?
14:47 Speaker 04 I actually think there's a great opportunity for us to partner with them because that kill switch might be implemented at the network layer because we may see something happening that they don't see at the upper layers. So we'll figure it out, but the teams are working on this day and night right now.
15:00 Speaker 03 The deal is getting made here on Decoder. You heard it.
15:02 Speaker 04 Exactly.
15:04 Speaker 03 This seems like the opportunity, right? When I say Cisco is a company that kind of grows with booms and busts. The amount of compute that everyone is describing that they need in order to deploy agents that scale across the enterprise, in order to train the next generation of models. This is a vast amount of compute. You are obviously going to help build the data centers that supply a lot of that compute. The question I have is, do you see the revenue on the back end of that? This is a lot of growth, a lot of forward investment.
15:32 Speaker 04 For them?
15:33 Speaker 03 For them and for you, right?
15:34 Speaker 04 We're getting the revenue now. We would not expect this build out to end anytime soon. And I think if you look at, everybody wants to talk about comparing this to the dot com era, right? And is it a bubble? Is it going to bust? I'm like, well, did the dot com, did it bust? Or did the winners emerge, the losers failed? And now we have what we have, which if they hadn't been successful, we wouldn't have any, we wouldn't be talking about anything we're talking about today. So it wasn't like it went away. You know, people lost money and, but the winners emerged. And I think you're going to see the same thing here. The difference is, in a lot of cases, the companies that are spending so much money
16:16 Speaker 04 on this infrastructure, view it as an existential issue for their survival. So they're going to continue to build, they're going to continue to invest, and I think they've proven that over the last few years. And I think it's got, we have a long way to go. We're very early in this cycle.
16:30 Speaker 03 So I have two thoughts about this. I'm eager to push you on. One, and this is, I think, just related to the infrastructure. A big part of the bubble there was we built a fiber network that sat dark for ages. And you can say that was good or bad, but we had it, and the fiber itself was valuable, even if it wasn't full of traffic yet. Is a data center valuable on the same scale? If you build a data center and there's not the consumer workload to run it, 20 years from now, you can't just show up and plug into the fiber the way that you could.
16:59 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that the difference is, is that unlike that fiber, these data centers are being used day one at full capacity.
17:06 Speaker 03 Sure.
17:07 Speaker 04 And in our world, it's about the networking connectivity, but it's also like optics, we haven't talked about optics, but we made some strategic acquisitions in optics, which has also just been a big deal for us. Because at some point, you're not going to be able to get the packets off the processor over copper, because the speed's just too great. And so us having both those technologies in-house is also another benefit for us as we look to the future.
17:30 Speaker 03 The other question about the comparison of the dot com era that I've been really thinking about is less dot com and more mobile, but if you look at the promise of the dot com era, it was we're going to take the economy and we're going to move it on to the internet, broadly, where you're going to buy, you're going to buy your pet food online and like, maybe you weren't going to buy it on a Dell desktop PC. It actually happened when we got to mobile, right? We just moved the economy on to the internet. Everyone's doing e-comm and it turns out buying pet food from Amazon on a computer totally works and that computer is a phone. And then Apple and Google get to extract rent from everybody for all their purchases in games and like, we have an economy that works that way. The promise of AI is we're going to do it again, right? We're going to move the economy a third time to a next
18:12 Speaker 03 paradigm in computing. What's the evidence you see that that is happening or will happen at the scale necessary to support this investment?
18:19 Speaker 04 Well, if you look at just some of the early agentic platforms, you heard Jensen this week talking about OpenClaw. If you just look at the early promise of what that can do for you, I think you're going to see that it's going to automate a lot. It's going to make your whole purchasing process different. I just reflect back on 2007 when the iPhone came out. None of us had any clue what we'd be doing with that phone today. None of us. I mean, maybe there's some people somewhere who were such visionaries, they saw it coming. But the application portfolio that we have today is much broader than we ever thought it would be. And I think you're going to see the same thing emerge around AI. We don't know what all is going to come. We have ideas about things that we think will happen, but
19:03 Speaker 04 we don't know everything that's going to happen. And I mean, this stuff's changing so fast. You know, I talked to Kevin at OpenAI and Kevin Will, and he's like, we'd sit down and have meetings about what are we going to do the next two months? And then three weeks later, we throw it out and start over again because everything's changing so quickly. And I think that's the way we're going to all have to operate, which is going to be very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
19:23 Speaker 03 Is that changing the way that you're selling your products to build this capacity? Because if you don't know what the capacity is for, it must change how it's being built.
19:32 Speaker 04 Well, it's changing a lot in how we design silicon. These customers are so big that they're a market of one. So we have unique requirements coming from an individual company, which we haven't had to deal with in the past. We built general purpose silicon, we sold it to everybody and it worked. So you have different applications, different use cases, different customers that are that are leading us to have to move faster and build more variants of some of this technology than we would have in the past.
19:57 Speaker 03 That's right up against the insatiable demand of other silicon providers, right? There's a capacity crunch for chips, there's a capacity crunch for RAM. How is that working for you? Are you able to get the flexibility you need?
20:12 Speaker 04 When you look at fab capacity, we could use more, but the world could use more. Everybody, I don't think you get anybody on here who builds chips that wouldn't say, I'd love to have more capacity. Same thing for memory. We're in a crunch for probably 18 months, something like that. We're doing everything we can to try to secure what we need and we feel pretty good about where we are right now, but we'll see how the demand plays out over the next year and a half.
20:38 Speaker 03 It occurs to me, just talking to people about RAM margins, I've talked to consumer laptop vendors, who say there might not be consumer laptops this year, right? Like it might just be
20:49 Speaker 04 Priced out?
20:49 Speaker 03 Priced out. Just to put a stick of memory in a cheap laptop, you might just never be able to cover the cost, we might just be out. I talked to the CEO of Razer, which makes gaming laptops with lots of fun lights. He's like, week to week, I don't know what the margin on that product will be. You've got to build a big piece of the infrastructure puzzle. The GPU is useless without the networking. This has to equalize somewhere for you at least, right? Where you say, look, this is our margin to build the networking, to get the value out of the GPUs that you're buying at super high rates from Nvidia and whoever else. Is that working in the market to equalize at least your prices?
21:24 Speaker 04 Networking equipment uses a lot less memory than compute platforms do, obviously. So we have memory in every networking device, but it's much smaller percentage of the BOM than it would be in a
21:34 Speaker 03 That's bill of materials.
21:35 Speaker 04 Bill of materials. Thank you. Sorry about that. Then it would be in like a server. And yeah, the customers understand. And what I keep trying to explain to them is we're the the price increase are happening upstream from us. You know, we're just an absorber of the price increase. And we're having to do more frequent price increases than we have. And we're having to change our terms to be able to deal with the the same thing that your your other guests talked about, which is the dynamic nature of the pricing that we see right now in the memory space. But when you go to the large hyperscalers, I said earlier, it's existential. What we've just adopted with them is more of just a transparent model. It says, here's, here's what we need. Here's how it works. Here's our pricing. And and they're generally like they they understand.
22:16 Speaker 03 Because there are other choices, especially for what you provide.
22:19 Speaker 04 Everybody's in the same boat. It's not like you're going to go somewhere else and somebody's going to give you memory at, you know, 10% of the cost of what we're giving it to you for. I mean, everybody's just trying to trying to deal with the capacity crunch right now.
22:33 Speaker 03 We have to pause here for a quick break. We'll be right back.
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24:45 Speaker 03 Welcome back. I'm talking with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins about the big decoder questions.
24:50 Speaker 03 I think this brings me to the decoder questions because my next set of questions after this are really how you're handling this sort of interlocking set of complicated puzzle pieces. Tell me how Cisco is structured right now. How's the company? How big is the company and how's it organized?
25:03 Speaker 04 We're 85,000 people plus some contractors. But and we're structured functionally like most companies. We've got a sales organization. We've got a product organization. The one change that I made about 18 months ago is that I consolidated all of our products under a single leader for the first time that I can remember. It's a big, complex portfolio. And so we did that. You know, we've got a services organization. It's fairly functional, pretty standard.
25:30 Speaker 03 You've been reducing the size of the company pretty substantially over the past three years, I would say, two, three years. 2024, you had two big rounds of layoffs. You just had some other little layoffs.
25:39 Speaker 04 Most of the time, those are rapid reallocations that we need to do. It's unfortunate, but typically the ones we've done have not been about reducing the total number of headcount. At least up till now, they have not generally been that way.
25:52 Speaker 03 I was just reading some coverage of those changes. There's a lot of, are these AI related layoffs?
25:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:57 Speaker 03 Is that on your mind that you might be thinking about new kinds of structures? New kinds of engineering structures?
26:04 Speaker 04 Sam and I were talking about this last week and let's say that our engineers become twice as productive because of coding as an example. This year we'll have five or six products that'll be 100% written by AI. Next year we'll probably have 70% of our code that'll be written by AI. You still have to test it. You still got to go through all that stuff. But let's say you make them twice as productive just for simplicity of math here. Then companies are going to have to decide, am I going to maintain the same pace of innovation with half the people? Or am I going to double my pace of innovation with the same number of people? And I think different companies are going to make different decisions and some variant in between. And I think that's where we're going to head. But we got to, we got to see this all come to life. I mean, we're seeing the early successes of coding, but we haven't, we haven't seen the unintended downside yet that we haven't figured out.
26:49 Speaker 04 We got 20 year old code, 30 year old code that's integrated in systems. It's written in C++ as an example. And my head of product told me, we took all these old lines of code. We compressed it to about 20% of what it was before, converted it to a modern language using AI. And my first response to him was, you better test that like crazy before you put it in a product and put it in a customer environment. So there's a lot of stuff we're still, we're still learning as we go through there.
27:15 Speaker 03 Stay on that for one second, right? Cisco code can't fail. If Cisco fails, something bad happens in an escalating catastrophic way. How do you think about that risk, right? I mean, this is, I keep joking that I ask everybody the org chart question. I've asked it for five years and there's like two answers, like we're functional or divisional. And we get through it. And now I think we're on the cusp of seeing some of the weirdest org charts in business history.
27:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:37 Speaker 03 Right? I manage a team of two people and 500 agents.
27:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:40 Speaker 03 Meta is about to do one manager to 50 individual contributors, all using agents to write code. I don't know how any of that's going to work. You can't take some of those risks, but you're describing the productivity gains that might come with some of those risks. How are you thinking about that?
27:52 Speaker 04 You're right. Our stuff, the, the whole mental model around our software development. Versus these models. Kevin Will from OpenAI said, he made a comment at our AI summit one. And he said, you guys should be using these models when they're working properly 10% of the time, just to get to, get to use them. And I sat there and I, I listened to that comment and it's just a different way of thinking. I mean, granted, they're going to get it to full, but you just go into it recognizing that it's, it's still evolving. We don't have that luxury. Our stuff has to work. So we'll have to, uh, we'll have to figure this out as we go, but we've seen how dependent the world is on technology functioning properly.
28:33 Speaker 04 And, uh, so we will have to just assess it as we get closer, but I think there's going to be an awful lot of testing that has to get done. But the flip side is we think we can, we think AI can help us find bugs more quickly. It can help us assess customers' infrastructure to say, hey, you're running these four versions of our software. We've seen a lot of instances where when you're running those four, it's created a problem or there's cybersecurity risks in certain parts of the code that AI can help us find. I mean, there's a lot of upside. So there's a lot of opportunity for AI to help us become more, more reliable, safer.
29:08 Speaker 03 You've mentioned security several times now. The flip side of we can deploy AI to help us with security is your adversaries or attackers might be able to deploy AI to attack you much more efficiently.
29:19 Speaker 04 And they are.
29:20 Speaker 03 How is that playing out for you?
29:22 Speaker 04 The emulations that you're going to see and the, the simulations, uh, of an email and video and, and people replicating me and sending it to, I mean, it's, it's just going to get crazier. And so we have to be better at using our tools. And I have also been a big proponent of all of the security competitors in the industry, uh, sort of laying down our weapons. And we still compete, but in service to our customers, I believe we have to share intelligence real time, much more effectively today to help our customers deal with this. Uh, because any one of us on our own is going to be less effective than all of us together.
30:05 Speaker 04 And so that's a big thing we've been pushing. We've been building a lot of capabilities. And there's a lot of opportunities to integrate our platforms and our threat intelligence. And if you think about what you can do with models, if you start training on threat intelligence and conditions that led up to threat vulnerabilities, there's an awful lot we can do to get ahead of this, and we need to do that.
30:26 Speaker 03 I think this brings me into the other decoder question I ask everybody. This is the one that I think it's going to be under pressure for everybody with the scale of change you're describing here. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?
30:38 Speaker 04 When I actually wrote my thesis, when I was going through the process of becoming CEO and the board was assessing the candidates, one of the things I called out in the document was that, and this is 12 years ago, okay, 11 and a half years ago, I said that the industry is moving so rapidly, you're going to have to have team-based strategy. You have to have a lot of people developing strategy because there's no one individual in general, there's some brilliant minds, so I'm not ruling any human out, but that can actually come up with the exact right strategy every time they're assessing what they need to do. So we spend a lot of time together as a team. We spend anywhere from one to three hours
31:20 Speaker 04 together every Monday. We're offsite together for two to three days every quarter. And the way we make decisions, look, 99% of the decisions get made below me because they're easy or two smart people agree. And when they get to me or any other CEO, they're typically, you're usually assessing two potential bad choices. Or you've got two smart people who completely disagree, which tells you it's complicated. In general, we just spend a lot of time in transparent discussion and open communication about how we're going to make the decisions. At the end of the day, I own them. So, and I have this belief that when a decision goes really well, you give everybody else a credit. And when it goes very poorly,
32:05 Speaker 04 it's all on me. And that's how you just have to operate.
32:08 Speaker 03 The decisions question. You are dealing with a vast amount of uncertainty, right? That how the global internet will be structured is a vast amount of uncertainty. What the hyperscalers need is they build out new capacity for uncertain workloads. Who knows? We're going to sell a bunch of products to the Neo clouds, which have circular financing, and those bills might not get paid, which I want to come to. That is a lot of uncertainty. Whether or not all of this infrastructure investment pays off in GDP growth, I would say is the biggest uncertainty of all. How are you dealing with that?
32:43 Speaker 04 You haven't got the three or four other big ones.
32:45 Speaker 03 Go ahead, what are they?
32:46 Speaker 04 Well, you've got the geopolitical situation. You've got sovereignty requirements all around the world emerging. You've got two wars around the world. You've got tariffs. You've got memory costs. You've got all these things that we're all trying to navigate. So it's pretty complicated.
32:57 Speaker 03 That is a lot of uncertainty on your decision making. You're saying it all rolls up to you and it goes wrong. Has that affected how you're making choices?
33:04 Speaker 04 You just have to move faster. We had a, we had an all hands with our entire company yesterday. We do it once a month. I told them, I said, look, if, if speed and change, if they make you uncomfortable, you're going to be uncomfortable. It is a world where companies can get seriously damaged in a very short period of time. And this is what's driving a lot of the investments because there's a big FOMO issue in the C-suite today. CEOs are like, what am I missing? What's my competitor going to do that I don't know about? And so I think what that leads us to is, you know, we used to say, get 80% of the information you can, then make the decision, then adjust as you go. And I think that's, maybe it's not 80 anymore, but you're going to have to take that approach
33:47 Speaker 04 and you're going to have to be willing to take risks and you've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And if you're not, it's going to be pretty complicated and pretty stressful time.
33:55 Speaker 03 Billions of dollars of capital are being allocated for infrastructure.
34:00 Speaker 03 Does it come up that the products that might pay this off don't exist? Does it come up next to the FOMO?
34:06 Speaker 04 Depends on the customer. If you look at the telcos, the cloud providers, the people whose core business is highly dependent upon products that we buy, I mean, everybody's this, but I mean, we will have those conversations, with their CEOs and their leadership team. You go to Mobile World Congress as an example. We were just there. Every meeting the CEO's in from those, some of those carriers and service providers. So they care. When you get into the enterprise space, some of them are super technical. They understand the value of technology. So they want to talk about trends. They want to talk about what's, what, what do we see other companies doing? Or what are we doing as an enterprise that they should be thinking about? But usually, if there's a big, something big going on the table, my, my only positioning
34:51 Speaker 04 with them is if you go with us, you have my personal commitment that we'll throw all the resources we need to, to make a new successful. And that's usually all they want to know.
34:59 Speaker 03 I feel like there's a split right now in the market. I, I understand the enterprise use cases for AI. I understand why you'd want to build as fast as you can there, right? Particularly software development, as you described, like we can, we can see the benefit. We talk to developers all the time here at The Verge. They're like, our entire jobs are different. Like the, the world has changed, the, the market has cracked open. Something is going to happen there. And then you downstream of that, you can see, okay, well, we hired a bunch of engineers to build us business process automation. Now maybe we get way more value out of those engineers. We get way more automation. There's something in the enterprise that's going to happen with AI.
35:33 Speaker 04 For sure.
35:33 Speaker 03 That feels like I understand the value. Do you see any consumer applications of that scale beyond just, I'm going to tell the Alexa to buy me shoes and then it's going to? Cause quite honestly, I don't yet, apart from Google search got a lot weirder in the past two years.
35:49 Speaker 04 I don't have any great examples yet. And you're right, you are seeing sort of some horizontal areas in the enterprise that are consistent across almost every company, like coding. Customer service is one that everybody's working. You're starting to see some emerging. Horizontal use cases in legal and we see we see a lot of use cases in our people organization too. And I think those are pretty standard. Everybody's everybody's at least aware of those opportunities. People are at different stages on the journey. But yeah, I'm not I'm not the consumer expert by any stretch. We're we're pure B to B. So that's where I spend all my time.
36:27 Speaker 03 I think this relates to why I started out by asking about data centers in space. And I've heard Sundar Pichai say variations of this idea. Without the big consumer application that everybody understands and sees the benefit, putting the data center in the backyard is becoming an increasingly harder sell.
36:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
36:45 Speaker 03 Right. The power requirements, the water requirements, which I know are controversial and often argued about, but just the energy resources requirements of the data centers are making the data centers unpopular. I don't think it's all that. I don't think the environmental argument historically wins in America. Like, I drive a V eight Mustang. I'm driving that car. We have an EV that's parked right next to it. But those cars are popular for reasons, right? Fast fashion, enormous environmental impact.
37:13 Speaker 04 Yep.
37:14 Speaker 03 People like it.
37:15 Speaker 04 Yep.
37:15 Speaker 03 There's not an AI product for consumers that they like so much that just transcends the objections they can reach for. We're seeing it play out in really weird ways, like in bipartisan ways, people are pushing back against the data centers. Are you going to be able to hit your goals if data center construction slows? And is there a way to overcome those goals without the great consumer product?
37:36 Speaker 04 I think there is. Look, we've been the most innovative country on the planet for a very long time, and that's not going to change. And some of the smartest people in the world are actually trying to solve these problems, and they will. By the way, I think if you give some of those residents the greatest AI tools on their phone that they've ever seen in their lives, they still don't want the data center in their backyard.
37:57 Speaker 03 Really?
37:57 Speaker 04 I don't I don't think they're gonna say, oh, this is great. So I'll go ahead and drive my energy costs through the roof and I'll be okay. You know, we saw a little bit of this with 5G. They didn't want radio towers. You remember? Remember that whole thing?
38:08 Speaker 03 Oh, I remember.
38:09 Speaker 04 This is that at a much greater scale, but I think I think they'll we'll figure it out.
38:16 Speaker 03 The 5G comparison is really interesting. I know you just came back from Mobile World Congress where we are gonna
38:19 Speaker 04 6G now.
38:20 Speaker 03 6G is coming.
38:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:21 Speaker 03 AI has the same problem, right? You can't describe what it's for in a way that might overcome the objection. That feels like a fairly unique point for the whole industry to be at, where the next generation of technology is very exciting to a handful of providers. It's the future of your business in real ways and the applications are harder and harder to describe. You've seen it all. I'm asking this question on that on that big sweep, right? We're talking about the internet. It was easy to describe what the internet might do for people.
38:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:48 Speaker 03 I actually disagree with you. I think a lot of people instantly saw what the phone would become, right? There was there was an excitement there. That's where you got startup founders from, like in that way that you got founders from.
38:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:59 Speaker 03 This one just seems more nascent to me. How would you place that in your sweep of history?
39:03 Speaker 04 We've seen some unique 5G use cases at a bit like manufacturing has been a great one, but they're very niche, right? The most prevalent 5G use case is actually backup connectivity for branches as an example. But you're right, we didn't have the number of use cases. And I think if you asked the CEOs of the telecoms, they would probably say that they're disappointed in the return they got on all the investment around 5G. I think robotics in general could be the could be the real driver of the utilization of 6G. Once it gets built, but again, it's it's early days of being defined. It's still typically, we've talked about these sort of tech transitions for years and years and years before they come to fruition.
39:47 Speaker 04 AI is different, although we did talk about it for a long time and then all of a sudden it broke loose. But the pace at which it's changing is just unprecedented. So I think we'll have to see on 6G. It's still TBD, but I don't expect that you'll see the same mistakes made from a from a speed of investment perspective until they become more clear.
40:08 Speaker 03 We're going to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.
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42:10 Speaker 03 Welcome back. I'm talking with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins about the data center needs of the AI era and whether or not consumers will buy into having all those data centers built across the country.
42:21 Speaker 03 The internet also was hand in hand with globalization.
42:24 Speaker 04 Yep.
42:24 Speaker 03 Right? We both have iPhones are made all over the world and you had this giant global network. Maybe this is going to lead to an age of prosperity. Maybe this is going to lead to an age of extreme labor displacement. Like you can read that however you want. There's a lot of opinions about what the internet and particularly global manufacturing, globalized manufacturing led to. That's all being undone. You can see that every single day that's being undone, whether that's tariffs in an effort to bring manufacturing back to the United States, which we talked about on the show with many of your peers, or whether it's, hey, we're going to put up big walls on the internet, right? Australia is going to have a social media ban for teens. They got to enforce that somehow. That's probably going to happen at the network layer. You have the European Union saying the data has to be here. We have to put the data here. The European data has to be in
43:09 Speaker 03 Europe. You build the networks. I'm imagining all of this is just one more layer of complication, even as you describe, okay, we should have global systems that bring us to an era of shared prosperity. How are you dealing with that?
43:22 Speaker 04 What you're seeing play out is not only do countries, and it's not limited to Europe at this point, not only do they want to have data sovereignty, they want to have sovereign control over any technology they're using. They don't want the US to have the ability to impede the use of that product under any conditions. As an example, some of the meeting platforms like WebEx or Zoom, et cetera, those things. They don't want any other country, and I'll say the US, but any other country to have the ability to cut off their access to use these platforms if they're going to invest and use them for critical reasons inside other countries. In many cases, they would prefer to have,
44:04 Speaker 04 let's use Europe as an example, European companies that build the technology that they use in their infrastructure. In many cases, they don't have that capacity at scale. And so then they have to go default to, who are the companies that I trust? And trust becomes such a big, we talked, it's a big discussion, obviously, around AI. But it is really a big deal. And so for us, as an example, every country we operate in, we have always tried to be good citizens, good members of the community. We've had education programs where we've been training on digital skills around the world for 25 years, 30 years. Last year alone, we trained over, we had 5 million learners go through
44:47 Speaker 04 one of these programs around the world. And so that trust element's going to become very important. The technology is one thing. You have to build technology that can be deployed, the way they want it to be deployed. And then you have to have a very high degree of trust.
45:00 Speaker 03 Is this changing how you're architecting some of your products?
45:03 Speaker 04 It is.
45:04 Speaker 03 What are some specifics?
45:05 Speaker 04 Well, you know, you'd love if you have a cloud solution. Historically, what you would do, and a lot of, a lot of companies were built this way, you build global instances and you, you partition it and you sell it off to different customers. If you go to Germany, as an example, and Germany says, I want to have my version of that running in my country, it's architecturally different than how you might have designed it to begin with. So we're now designing a lot of those control systems or those cloud oriented systems so that they can be structured in a way where they can run in a country alone. And, and we don't think about building global instances anymore.
45:37 Speaker 03 This is like a very different way of building the internet, right? Like, it just isn't the thing. Like, my first experience with the internet was watching the coffee pot at the University of England, right? Like, this was the promise when I was like a kid, watching like a one frame a minute live stream of a coffee pot. Being like, I can go there. And now we're like, oh, we're, this thing happens.
45:57 Speaker 04 You watch live streams of coffee pots for real?
45:59 Speaker 03 Do you remember this? Like, 1994, it's like the first video feed on the internet was a coffee pot in Cambridge.
46:03 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, yeah.
46:04 Speaker 03 It just like blew my mind as a kid. This is like, in some ways, it's more than ever. Right? You can watch live streams of all the coffee pots if you want to. And in some ways, this is just closing down, right? Every country is saying, our citizens are here, we're going to manage what they do. Their lives are on the internets, we are going to control the internet, our country. And that's happening all over the place in all kinds of different ways. It's honestly happening state to state. Like, the internet in California looks different than the internet in Texas today. You're the networking provider for, for many of these countries, for many of these companies. When you think about the sweep of what the internet might look like, when you think about the amount of compute that's happening in a data center as opposed to happening locally on my laptop, right? Which is always a kind of dance. What does the internet in the next five years look like to you?
46:47 Speaker 04 Well, it's going to be more fragmented, for sure. I think you are going to see Lots of, you're seeing the cloud providers build in regions in certain places and they're having to re-architect to think about this. For most of the functionality that we use the internet for today, I'm not sure it's going to change much, to be honest. There are going to be controls that are going to exist, but I don't think it's going to change the core, normal operating functionality of how it works today. They'll be there in the case of an issue or an emergency. Now, where you store data and all those kinds of things, that's not the network's issue. So, how that plays out is independent of what we would think about. But I think you get in a times of crisis and that's when
47:28 Speaker 04 you might see things happen differently. If you're a certain country and you get into a conflict and you want to isolate yourself from a communications perspective so that you can trust that your communication is clear, then maybe that creates short-term dynamics for your citizens. But I don't think on a normal day-to-day basis, it's going to be that meaningfully different.
47:49 Speaker 03 We're seeing that right now. Like, India shuts off the internet and cashware all the time. Iran and the internet, it's like on and off every day. Are those things that your customers are coming to you and saying, "One level up, the government wants this capability in the network, can you help us build it?"
48:01 Speaker 04 They are having those conversations around primarily not wanting to have a third party or another country disintermediate their capabilities through tech by having some control lever or kill switch or something of that nature. That's typically what they're talking about.
48:17 Speaker 03 How does that play into AI a bit, right? Like, now we have these workloads built on networks that you're supplying, and you've got a bunch of agents doing stuff all day long, and you're saying, "We're going to be the security provider for it." At some point, does Donald Trump get to say, "Turn off the agents, it's getting out of control"?
48:33 Speaker 04 Well, I think you have to think about security at an agent level, like you do at an employee level, but on steroids.
48:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:40 Speaker 04 It's going to be five to 10x more security that you'll need to apply. Maybe more, I'm just throwing numbers out. But I think we have to figure that out as we get going. But it's certainly going to introduce an entry point for bad actors to do things that you certainly wouldn't want them to be able to do. And we're learning and everybody's working on this problem simultaneously right now.
49:03 Speaker 03 I feel like for most of this conversation, my assumption has been, this is going to keep going. This is going to keep working and the problems will be complicated, and everyone will work diligently and will solve them. And someone will invent the consumer product, and all of this will pay off. What if it doesn't? What if this bubble pops? What does that look like for you?
49:19 Speaker 04 There'll be lost misplaced capital. There'll be companies that'll shut their doors. And then there'll be, the winners will emerge and will build out at scale, just like we saw the first wave. I would suspect that's what will happen. I think there's certainly going to be companies that are going to cease to exist. They're going to go away. That's what happens on any of these early things. You know, you, you, you take a risk. That's why the reward's so high. It's, it's risk reward. And so it's just, it's the nature of these massive transitions. And this is bigger than probably, it's bigger and faster than anything we've ever seen.
49:52 Speaker 03 The amount of capital tied up in what you might call circular financing with some of these neo clouds, that seems dangerous to me. It seems like if I had to point it where the, where things will get shaky first, it will be, well, we did a lot of forward investment, a lot of debt investment into neo clouds against workloads that themselves have not yet paid off. Eventually, all the way, you know, the bill comes due, right? Or the investments don't happen. Is that a risk that's on your mind?
50:18 Speaker 04 It is, but not, not particularly for us. We're super conservative. So we, um, I, I don't, I don't think, I've heard instances where we've looked at some of the financials and have chosen not to do business with some of these folks. And I think every company's got to make their own decisions. We also have creative financing solutions that protect us that, you know, that we can work through, but we're not, uh, you know, we, we learned a lot in 2000. So.
50:44 Speaker 03 The name neo clouds, are you, are you in them? Are you staying away from them?
50:47 Speaker 04 No, we're, we're in, we're in some of them. Some of them want to use us. A lot of them want partnerships with us, honestly, because they want the enterprise access and they don't have a robust enterprise and, uh, sales force. And they think that we can help them there. And so in many cases, we work together to figure that out.
51:05 Speaker 03 The other way I can see things maybe not get shaky, but change dramatically in a way that changes the sort of investment availability to the AI industry is if inference becomes more valuable than training. Right? So far, all the emphasis has been, we got to run these GPUs right hot to do training. Cause the next version of the model will finally be capable enough to, I don't know, be your girlfriend. Like whatever it is that they think they're going to do. Like there, something about training has been the, the point.
51:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:32 Speaker 03 We're going to, we're going to build AGI. They don't want to say it. They're saying it all the time. There's a chance that the models are good enough and it's actually just inference now. We're just going to run agents and Claude code is big enough to to actually affect meaningfully affect enterprise cost dynamics. Does that change your business if we're done with training and actually inference is the point?
51:51 Speaker 04 No, it actually is great.
51:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
51:53 Speaker 04 I don't think you're going to be done with training, by the way. I think it's going to be additive. I think the inferencing stuff is going to be additive.
51:58 Speaker 03 Do you need all the new data center built out if it's the inferencing instead of the training?
52:01 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, we would like to participate and we'd like to see that continue to grow, obviously, because it's good for our business. But the inferencing side and some people believe that that's going to be bigger. A lot of enterprise customers are going to want to do the inferencing at a point of interaction with a customer and have an immediate value that they're garnering in that interaction with that customer. And that's going to be very distributed. And so distributed compute requires high performance networks, which is good for us. So we like that.
52:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's this is what I was mentioning, that the dynamic between the edge and the data center seems to always be changing. I think I saw some press releases out of Nvidia's GTC about more compute coming to the edge of certain big network providers. Are you seeing that play out that we don't know where it's supposed to be? So where everyone's investing in both the edge and the data center?
52:50 Speaker 04 It's still early at the edge. I think everybody believes they're going to need it. And we're seeing certain applications where you're starting to see people pilot it. And I think this may be a good opportunity for the telecom providers. They are there's always been this thesis that edge compute was going to be a big benefit for them.
53:05 Speaker 03 That was the thesis of 5G. I went to a I won't say the name.
53:09 Speaker 04 It was part of it, yeah.
53:10 Speaker 03 I went to a very long dinner with one of the major telecom providers and they told me all the all about self-driving cars powered by edge networks.
53:17 Speaker 04 You could see this become something, you know, there's, there's discussions now of inferencing grids and dynamic routing of of these inferencing requests based on everything from cost of power at a given certain time, given time of day to capacity that's available. I mean, there's a lot of thinking about how this plays out. And I think it's it's still TBD, but it's coming.
53:42 Speaker 03 So I want to just bring this all back around. The business here is is building data centers with people, right, with with big customers.
53:48 Speaker 04 It's part of it. We also connect all the employees and everything else, too.
53:51 Speaker 03 Sure. I mean, do you want me to talk about WebEx for another hour? Because I have a lot of notes about WebEx.
53:56 Speaker 04 We can talk about anything you want.
53:57 Speaker 03 Apple uses WebEx. Does Tim Cook ever say, dude, can you just make the Mac client a little bit better?
54:02 Speaker 04 No, it's actually better than most others. Do you use it?
54:05 Speaker 03 I mean, I'm a journalist. I'm on calls with all these companies a lot of times. So WebEx comes up in my life.
54:09 Speaker 04 Okay, good. Well, I'm glad to hear that.
54:10 Speaker 03 I think I I'm just telling you, find the person, the native Mac client.
54:14 Speaker 04 I'm gonna get one of my guys to get on the phone with you and make sure that.
54:16 Speaker 03 We gotta do it on the show and we'll just go through a demo together. But you gotta be there.
54:20 Speaker 04 I gotta be there?
54:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:21 Speaker 04 All right.
54:22 Speaker 03 We'll live do notes on a WebEx call.
54:25 Speaker 04 I'll do that.
54:25 Speaker 03 Every time an enterprise software CEO comes on the show, I'm like, do you use your product? And I would say it's a 50/50.
54:31 Speaker 04 I do, all day long.
54:32 Speaker 03 You obviously do.
54:33 Speaker 04 All day long. But I was also a coder early in my life, so I'm a little weird. I use Claude Code, so I'm, you know, so.
54:40 Speaker 03 You're in it.
54:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
54:42 Speaker 03 All right. But I'm saying the growth of the business, the explosive growth that everyone's seeing is in AI, right? It's in building these new generation data centers, this new generation of compute. The problem, and I just keep circling around to it, is the people don't want those data centers near them. And I have yet to see the argument for why that should happen. I, in my mind, the argument is great consumer products, right? Like, that's, if you're like, that's where Netflix comes from, I think people will calm down. But that's not the argument we're making right now. There isn't a product like Netflix.
55:11 Speaker 04 That's where Netflix comes from.
55:12 Speaker 03 I think if you're like, Netflix is building a data center in a town, people are like, that rules.
55:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's gonna be faster.
55:18 Speaker 03 Right. Is Tom Cruise gonna be there? Like, there's something there would be, right there. You would have some emotional connection to the thing that's happening. We don't have that right now. The pressure on not building these data centers is only gonna go up, right? In weird ways. I think in Alabama, there's a state center that proposed blocking solar build-outs is a way to reduce data center interest in his state. Like, that's a weird outcome. What happens if we can't build more data centers? What happens if the public just doesn't buy in?
55:47 Speaker 04 We'll build them in space faster, I guess.
55:49 Speaker 03 I mean, this is what, this is why I started saying, are you just trying to escape the political problems of Earth?
55:54 Speaker 04 I don't think they're political problems. I think they're issues of utility and power and cooling and water and all those things. I mean, they're all interconnected. But I don't wake up every day and deal with this issue. But the people who do are very smart people. I think the thing that a consumer is gonna be okay with is if you go in somewhere and you not only build a data center, but somehow you increase the electricity, the utility capacity of that community, or you do something positive in that community. Beyond streaming Netflix faster, I think that's when they'll be okay with it. I don't think their concerns are around it being unsightly or anything like that. I think the issue is the concern over the inflationary pressure that it puts on utilities
56:39 Speaker 04 and the things that they need.
56:40 Speaker 03 I mean, I think one of the other, you know, in my hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, there's supposed to be a Foxconn factory and that never came to pass. And now it's going to be a Microsoft data center instead of 13,000 or 15,000 jobs, which is whatever Foxconn promised to that site. There's going to be like a couple of thousand. So this is a lot of water, a lot of power, and then not the economic lift that you get. And then maybe the inflationary pressures on power or other utilities. As your customers are building out, are you working with them to reduce those pressures to find ways to make the data centers more efficient?
57:13 Speaker 04 Well, our role is really around the power consumption of the platforms that we sell them. So, and that's a massive part of our innovation cycle. Every time we want to deliver higher performance, lower power consumption. And so that's, that's the role that we play in that space.
57:27 Speaker 03 Well, Chuck, you've given us a lot of time. What's next for Cisco? What should we, what should we be looking out for?
57:31 Speaker 04 Look, it's hard to predict what's, what's going to happen. I mean, we were, as I said earlier, we had a high degree of luck with the optics investments and the silicon investments that we made.
57:42 Speaker 04 We had some smart people who were suggesting that we make them, but they've turned out to be magical for us right now. I think for the next three to five years, we're going to be spending every ounce of our energy on secure connectivity in this agentic era. But I mean, three years from now, I don't know what we'll need to do because things are changing so quickly. But I think we're as prepared as we can be.
58:02 Speaker 03 Well, we're going to have to have you back sooner than three years to see.
58:04 Speaker 04 Whatever you say. I gotta come back and do WebEx with you, apparently.
58:07 Speaker 03 Chuck, thank you so much for being on Decoder, man.
58:09 Speaker 04 Thanks, man.
58:12 Speaker 03 I'd like to thank Chuck Robbins for taking the time to join Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram, at DecoderPod. Check those out. They're a lot of fun. If you'd like to go there, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Statt, and edited by Ursula Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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