Ex-Cisco exec Mike Volpi compares internet and AI buildouts in a16z talk

On November 11, 2026, a16z released a conversation in which former Cisco Senior Vice President Mike Volpi sat opposite a16z partners Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller and was asked whether the current wave of AI infrastructure build-out resembles the internet infrastructure boom of the 1990s. The timing was notable: CoreWeave had just reported third-quarter results that beat expectations, and the NeoCloud sector had surged more than 12% in a single day, briefly easing what the market had been calling AI-return anxiety.

Volpi is one of the few people qualified to answer the question. He joined Cisco in 1994, and by 2000, when he left his M&A role to move into operating positions, he had led roughly 70 acquisitions, including the campaigns that helped Cisco take the largest share of the global Ethernet switch market; at that point Cisco briefly became the most valuable company in the world. During the same era, fiber optic cable was laid in the ground at a furious pace, and bandwidth supply far outstripped demand. When the bubble burst, the stock fell from $80 to $9, and market value evaporated by 90% in a single quarter.

The conversation was structured as a causal comparison rather than nostalgia: where the two infrastructure booms are similar, where they differ in essence, and who ultimately ends up holding the assets. Volpi's view is that AI infrastructure resembles the fiber build-out of that era — the assets will eventually prove useful, but they may not belong to today's players. The discussion also touched on GPU scarcity in what he called Jensen's world, a shakeout among NeoCloud providers, and the fact that data center networking is approaching a moment of disruption.

Based on the available material, the event stands at this point: a16z has published the conversation, and no further statements from Volpi or the firm have been reported since.