Cisco teams up with Sharon AI, NVIDIA for its first secure AI factory

Stefan Leitl, VP and general manager at Cisco ANZ told CRN this factory is to accelerate AI adoption.

Cisco has unveiled its first secure AI factory in Australia in a bid to help accelerate AI adoption amongst its partners and customers.

The networking giant has partnered with Sharon AI and NVIDIA to build, develop and deploy the facility.

This secure AI facility will provide customers a variety of solutions tailored to different customer needs and industries. Customers will also have access to a sandbox environment to experiment with proof-of-concepts.

This is the first NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) deployment in the market featuring the latest NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs.

Stefan Leitl, VP and general manager at Cisco ANZ told CRN Australia that the country is “rich with data” and its goal is to unlock this potential with the new factory.

"This aligns closely with Australia’s National AI Action Plan, which emphasises the importance of secure, responsible AI adoption and leveraging data to foster innovation and global competitiveness,” he said.

“It is critical for our nation to effectively compete in the global AI race, and the Cisco Secure AI Factory is designed to empower Australian enterprises and governments to harness their data securely and responsibly for maximum innovation and impact.”

According to Leitl, the facility, hosted by NextDC, is available to enterprises, cloud-native organisations, universities and government entities.

“The first pod will be in Sydney with plans to expand across Australia and New Zealand,” he said.

Leitl explained that partnering with Sharon AI is a “significant milestone”,

“By combining Sharon AI's advanced capabilities with Cisco's secure infrastructure and NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra GPUs, we're enabling Australian organisations to unlock the full potential of AI-safely, responsibly, and at scale,” he ended.