Cisco named Microsoft and Alibaba as production customers, then co-authored an optics standard with Nvidia
Cisco named Microsoft and Alibaba as production customers for its P200 routing chip at OCP on October 12, the same day it co-authored an optics standard with Nvidia. One supplier, a socket on both sides of the AI networking fight.
Vincent Jiang · 4 min read
At the Open Compute Project Global Summit this week, Cisco's October 12 release did something vendors rarely do: it let the customers speak. Anand Ramakrishna, corporate vice president of engineering at Microsoft+0.97% — Microsoft, up 0.97 percent today, said Microsoft has "moved into production" on systems built around Cisco's−0.23% — Cisco, down 0.23 percent today Silicon One P200 routing chip. Dennis Cai, who leads network infrastructure at Alibaba−0.37% — Alibaba, down 0.37 percent today Cloud, said Alibaba deployed its own Quantum Cat routers on the same silicon at 51.2 terabits per second, running the open-source SONiC operating system 1. The wires covered Cisco's optics announcement. The two production deployments went unwritten.
The chip matters because it is new and it is already earning. Cisco launched the P200 only on October 8, 2025 2. A year from launch to production inside two of the world's largest cloud networks points to live orders in Cisco's AI pipeline, not sampling or pilots. Cisco shares closed 3.21% lower on the announcement day, which may signal the market has not priced the customer news, though a one-day move has many causes 1.
Cisco's rival is also its co-author
The same day, Cisco and Nvidia+0.30% — Nvidia, up 0.30 percent today unveiled the USFP pluggable optics specification, a 400-gigabit-per-lane module planned at four times the bandwidth density and 1.3 times the power efficiency of today's 200G optics, scaling from 6.4T to a 12.8T design path 145. Nvidia marketing director Brian Sparks said plainly that USFP is "not part of the partnership," a separate bet 5. Meanwhile Cisco's own Nexus 9100 switches will ship with Nvidia Spectrum silicon inside 3. So Cisco sells the silicon Microsoft and Alibaba use to keep their backbones out of Nvidia's integrated stack, co-authors a standard with that same company, and carries Nvidia's chips in its own boxes.
USFP lifts a single pluggable module's capacity up to eightfold
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Today's 1.6T pluggables | 1.6Tb/s |
| USFP 16-lane (estimate) | 6.4Tb/s |
| USFP 32-lane path (estimate) | 12.8Tb/s |
The receipts behind the pitch
Cisco's own figures, unaudited, all point one way: more capacity per chip and per watt. One P200 does the processing work of 92 earlier-generation chips and draws 65% less power than the 8804 system it replaces at the same routing capacity, per Cisco 2. The 102.4-terabit G300 switching chip is already shipping in customer systems, and the 51.2-terabit G302 top-of-rack chip is set to ship before the end of 2026 13. Each is a company claim, but the direction is consistent.
A routing socket is not the whole battlefield
The counterpoint is real. What Microsoft and Alibaba bought is routing and data center interconnect, a narrower socket than the scale-out switch fabric where Arista and Nvidia fight hardest. A filings-based analysis of Arista's results puts its June-quarter revenue at $3.04 billion, up 37.7%, with an adjusted operating margin of 49.9% and 2026 guidance raised three times to $12.6 billion; Nvidia's networking revenue topped $31 billion in its fiscal year ended January 2026 7. And Arista shows how fast named customers can move: two customers took 26% and 16% of its 2025 revenue, chief executive Jayshree Ullal names Microsoft and Meta+2.48% — Meta, up 2.48 percent today as its oldest partners, and when Meta adopted Nvidia's Spectrum-X in October 2025, Arista shares lost roughly 10% of their value in two days 7. Microsoft itself is one of those two. If Cisco's named customers follow the same logic, the P200 socket can reprice too.
Two customers grew to 42% of Arista's 2025 revenue
Data
| Two largest customers, share of Arista revenue | |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 39% |
| 2024 | 35% |
| 2025 | 42% |
Two readings to check
Watch two things. First, Cisco's next quarterly report: the named deployments are marketing until they appear as AI product orders in the financials. Second, the USFP multi-source project, where Cisco and Nvidia are building the hardware ecosystem with TE Connectivity and Amphenol 5; how many suppliers sign tells whether this becomes the pluggable standard or one more faction. The honest read: Cisco collects revenue whichever architecture wins, and the same diversification cuts both ways if both camps eventually bypass it.
Sources: 1. CNW Group via Yahoo Finance, Cisco Advances Scalability and Openness at OCP 2026, October 12, 2026 2. Crypto Briefing, Microsoft puts Cisco Silicon One P200 systems to work in its network, October 12, 2026 3. CRN, OCP 2026: Cisco Expands AI Networking Stack With New Silicon One And Nvidia Optics Push, October 13, 2026 4. Cisco blog, Cisco and NVIDIA Announce USFP: Expanding the Path to AI Connectivity, October 12, 2026 5. NVIDIA and Cisco via Yahoo Finance (GlobeNewswire), NVIDIA and Cisco Introduce New Pluggable Optics Form Factor to Scale AI$29B — Scale AI, private, latest valuation $29B Factories, October 12, 2026 6. Network World, Cisco, Nvidia push ultra-dense networking for Ethernet AI fabrics, October 13, 2026 7. note.com (Umaki, filings-based analysis of Arista Networks−3.46% — Arista Networks, down 3.46 percent today), October 13, 2026
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
