Light Reading analysoi Ciscon edesottamuksia AI-buumissa ja Nokiakin mainititaan:
According to Synergy Research Group, worldwide spending on data center hardware and software in 2024 will grow by 34% from 2023, “pushing it to an all-time high.”
Google, Meta, Amazon and others led much of that investment. Indeed, according to the BofA analysts, those cloud companies are expected to grow their total capital expenses by more than 50% in 2024 – with an additional 22% growth in 2025. Much of that is due to the expensive hardware required to run high-performance AI applications in the cloud.
BofA told investors to expect data center investments to evolve through three different phases. The first is clear and happening now: Big cloud companies like Microsoft and Meta are investing in data centers for generative AI (GenAI) applications. The second phase will include smaller cloud players – think Oracle, Bytedance and Apple – building their own AI infrastructure.
“Lastly, phase 3 is related to enterprises finding the right applications for the trained AI models,” the analysts wrote. “We expect this phase to have slightly different characteristics, as we believe enterprises will build their own edge cloud capabilities for inferencing purposes.”
All that investment is drawing a variety of new faces into the sector, including those that have traditionally sat in the smartphone market. For example, Nokia – at one time a smartphone company – is now touting its sales into AI data centers. And Qualcomm – which mainly makes chips for smartphones – is reportedly preparing silicon for data center applications.
But in routing solutions that connect data centers, the BofA analysts said Cisco is the dominant player with 31.8% share – Nokia, Huawei and Juniper, meanwhile, each have around 18% share. Cisco is also the commanding leader in the core routing market, they added.
In edge routing – an area poised for growth thanks to AI inferencing – the BofA analysts found that Cisco holds 26.1% share, slightly lower than Nokia’s 28.7% share and higher than Huawei’s 18.9%.
“We believe this market could experience higher than historical growth … due to Data Center Interconnect (DCI) deployments by cloud titans on the back of buildouts of Ethernet-based AI networks,” the analysts wrote.
https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/a-deeper-dive-into-cisco-s-ai-prospects
