(Reuters) -Cisco Systems raised its forecast for full-year profit and revenue on Wednesday, banking on multi-billion-dollar data center expansions to drive demand for its networking equipment.
Shares of the San Jose, California-based company, a supplier of networking technologies for cloud, enterprise and communications service providers, rose more than 4% in extended trading.
Companies such as Cisco have been reaping the benefits of businesses rapidly migrating workloads to the cloud and pouring billions
into upgrading campus infrastructure in response to surging adoption of AI models.
"Our relevance in AI continues to build and we have a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar campus refresh opportunity starting to ramp, with strong demand for our refreshed networking products," Chief Financial Officer Mark Patterson said in a statement.
Tech giants Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have all signaled plans to boost annual capital spending as they invest heavily in data centers and advanced chips.
Cisco expects fiscal 2026 revenue to be between $60.2 billion and $61 billion, compared with its prior projection of $59 billion to $60 billion.
It also forecast annual adjusted earnings in the range of $4.08 to $4.14 per share, compared with $4 to $4.06 per share projected earlier.
The company's revenue for the first quarter ended October 25 stood at $14.88 billion, while analysts on average estimated $14.77 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
