YouSaid · the spoken record

Chuck Robbins

lines on the record: 80
first: 2026-04-06
most recent: 2026-04-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 the price increase are happening upstream from us. 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 deal with the same thing that 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 that says here's what we need, here's how it works, here's our pricing. And they're generally like, they understand.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 bomb than it would be in a.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at fab capacity, we could use more, but the world could use more. 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 leading us to have to move faster and build more variants of some of this technology than we would have in the past.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much, 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 are 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 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just moved the economy onto the internet. Everyone's doing e-comm, and it turns out buying pet food from Amazon on a computer totally works when that computer is a phone. And then Apple and Google get to extract rent from everybody for all their purchases and 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 paradigm in computing. What's the evidence you see that that is happening or will happen at the scale necessary to support this investment?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other question about the comparison to 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 onto the internet. Broadly, you're gonna buy you're gonna buy your pet food online, and like maybe you weren't gonna buy it on Adele desktop PC. It actually happened when we got to mobile.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't just Yeah, I think that the difference is that unlike that fiber, these data centers are being used day one at full capacity. 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 is just too great. And so us having both those technologies in-house is also another benefit for us as we look to the future.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, people lost money, 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 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 we have a long way to go. We're very early in this cycle”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It wasn't like it went away.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 of 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's co-oppetition. 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 sales of fully integrated stack that has networking included in it, and sometimes they'll just that's a pathodise 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. 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...”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a 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 LIBA. You know, we're one of basically three companies in the world that can build a 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 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 they're turning to you.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's my World Congress. We're going to There's certainly more. 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 from the big hyperscalers. And this year we'll do billions and most of that's driven by AI infrastructure in their data centers. So I think you're assumption is accurate.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you connect everything, I think primarily when people 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 with mobile 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. 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 and 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?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's it. I think it just eliminates a lot of the challenges that you're facing on the planet. And so 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. 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 to 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The teams that currently build our data centers are the logical ones to actually do this analysis, and I think that's what's happening right now.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same with perhaps different interfaces for different satellite technology, things like that, but shouldn't be too dissimilar.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the 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 a lot of things that our team's thinking through right now.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think up there you have unlimited unimpeded. And so 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. But given his history, I wouldn't doubt him. And we're going to prepare to have our technology ready.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plan 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. Can't we just do solar power here on Earth? Is that not a possibility?”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely And we will Yeah, I think so. 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.”
2026-04-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wants data centers in space · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT