Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Cisco outlined its vision for the AI-ready data center, introducing a “factory” approach to AI infrastructure designed to help enterprises in the UAE move from pilots to large-scale AI production more quickly, securely, and efficiently.

For decades, enterprises have thought about their data centers in terms of workloads. Applications came in, resources were provisioned, and IT leaders focused on making those workloads run as efficiently as possible.

AI changes that equation. Training and inference aren’t just workloads, they’re production pipelines. They consume vast amounts of data, create unpredictable demands on infrastructure, and require coordination across compute, networking, and security. The challenge is compounded by data that’s distributed across many sources—on-premises and in the cloud.

To make AI real, the data center itself must evolve from supporting workloads to running factories: modular, repeatable, and secure environments designed to turn data into intelligence for mission-critical use cases across sectors such as government, financial services, healthcare, and telecom in the UAE.

Why factories, not workloads? The “factory” model isn’t just a metaphor. Like industrial factories, AI infrastructure needs:

  • Standardized units that can be replicated and scaled, whether for inference at the edge or training in the core
  • Lifecycle management that ensures each part of the production line operates consistently across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
  • Tightly integrated systems where compute, networking, and security move in lockstep

“Across the UAE, we see customers moving quickly from AI experimentation to large-scale deployment,” said Mohannad Abuissa, Cisco’s Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer for the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Romania, and CIS. “That shift requires a new approach to data center design that treats AI not as a one-off workload, but as an always-on ‘factory’ for intelligence. With Cisco’s Secure AI Factory and AI-ready data center solutions, we’re helping organizations in the UAE build scalable, secure, and efficient AI infrastructure that supports their national and sector-specific digital transformation goals. This is about giving CIOs and IT teams the confidence to industrialize AI while protecting their data, their users, and their investments.”

Cisco approach

On any factory floor, the value isn’t a single machine. It’s in how every piece works together to create consistent outcomes. AI infrastructure is no different. Compute and graphics processing units (GPUs) act as the engines, the network becomes the conveyor system, and security provides the guardrails.

The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA brings these components together with software and acceleration stacks into a validated, end-to-end stack. At the heart of the factory are Cisco AI PODs: modular, repeatable units that enterprises can scale up, replicate, or place wherever data is created and decisions need to be made. AI PODs provide organizations with the capabilities required today while preserving flexibility for future AI growth.

Cisco has done the testing and validation up front so customers can accelerate deployment with confidence. Everything works together.

Unlike other AI factories, the Cisco Secure AI Factory is designed with security built in from the start. Every piece of data generated by AI workloads is protected and organizations gain clear visibility into how it runs. Organizations can easily track, manage, and improve their AI environments over time.

This isn’t just about servers, switches, or software in isolation. It’s about an integrated production environment designed to help enterprises move fast with confidence, simplify operations at scale, and protect the investments they make in AI—today and tomorrow.

The road ahead

Enterprises don’t need another workload-optimized server. They need a factory model for AI: scalable, secure, and simple to manage across the data center lifecycle.

That’s the shift Cisco is leading. Cisco is giving customers the foundation to move from pilot to production and to run AI not as isolated projects, but as an industrial-scale engine for competitive advantage.