Cisco Systems reported fiscal first-quarter earnings Thursday that beat Wall Street's expectations across the board, giving investors a rare dose of good tech-earnings news on a day when the market's attention was locked on Nvidia's CEO shake-up.

The networking giant posted adjusted earnings of $1.40 per share on revenue of $18.5 billion, topping the LSEG consensus estimates of $1.33 per share and $18.1 billion in revenue. Revenue was up 24% from $14.88 billion a year earlier. Net income came in at $4.6 billion, or $1.14 per share, more than triple the $2.9 billion, or 72 cents per share, Cisco earned in the same quarter last year.

For the current quarter, Cisco guided to revenue of $18.0 billion to $18.2 billion, ahead of the roughly $17.88 billion analysts had modeled, and adjusted earnings of $1.34 to $1.36 per share, above the $1.23 average estimate.

AI Orders Keep Climbing

The headline number for investors watching the AI buildout: Cisco said it now expects $9 billion in AI infrastructure revenue from hyperscale cloud customers this fiscal year, more than double what it logged in fiscal 2026, when full-year AI infrastructure orders totaled roughly $9.3 billion for the full year, a figure the company had called a "Networking Supercycle" when it reported those results in August.

CUSTOMERS ARE TURNING TO CISCO'S TRUSTED, MARKET-DEFINING TECHNOLOGY AS THEY ADOPT AGENTIC AI

CEO Chuck Robbins credited the demand to enterprises racing to build out networking capacity for artificial intelligence workloads, saying customers are turning to Cisco's "trusted, market-defining technology" as they adopt agentic AI, according to the company's earnings call.

Shares rose in extended trading following the report. Cisco stock had already climbed roughly 35% so far this year heading into Thursday's close, far outpacing the Nasdaq's roughly 9% gain over the same stretch.

The results landed on a turbulent day for tech stocks broadly: the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.39% and the S&P 500 fell 0.35% as markets digested Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's resignation amid a spiraling scandal, dragging down chipmakers and so-called "neocloud" data-center stocks even as Cisco's own AI-driven networking business kept humming.

Investors will get the next read on the AI infrastructure build-out when Cisco reports fiscal second-quarter results early next year; for now, Thursday's numbers suggest demand for the networking gear underpinning AI data centers has yet to show cracks, even as confidence in some of the sector's biggest names has wavered.