Arista Benefits From AI Networking Surge: Will Momentum Persist?

Arista Networks, Inc. ANET is benefiting from the rapid expansion of AI data-center infrastructure. AI workloads require very large numbers of GPUs to communicate with each other at high speed. As AI clusters are becoming larger to cater to surging AI workloads, the networking infrastructure connecting these processors also needs to become faster and more reliable.

Arista’s comprehensive Etherlink AI fabric portfolio is gaining from these evolving trends. The company recently disclosed that the number of cumulative Etherlink customers has grown to more than 100 compared with only four or five customers in 2024. As AI infrastructure becomes more complex, customers increasingly need networking capabilities such as traffic engineering, low latency, reliability and security. These factors are driving demand for Arista’s EOS operating system.

ANET is expanding beyond a single accelerator ecosystem. The company currently uses a high percentage of NVIDIA GPUs. However, the company is exploring other options such as AMD's MI-series accelerators, Google's TPUs and various inference accelerators. Different accelerators and AI architectures can require different networking configurations. The growing diversity of AI accelerators and AI architectures is expanding Arista's addressable networking opportunity.

AI infrastructure is increasingly being distributed across multiple locations. Customers are facing constraints related to power, physical space and compute capacity. Arista’s 7800 platform is designed to support such distributed AI environments by providing high-capacity switching and routing capabilities. The company is expanding its portfolio to address issues at scale across networking architecture. The company estimates the Scale-Across switching and routing market could reach $15-$20 billion by 2030. The use case is expected to represent roughly 30% of its overall AI target of at least $3.6 billion in 2026.

How Are Competitors Faring?

Arista faces competition from Cisco Systems CSCO and Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE in the AI networking space. Cisco closed fiscal 2026 with $9.3 billion in hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders, about 4.5 times fiscal 2025, and roughly $4 billion in related revenues. Management expects hyperscaler AI revenues to reach $7.5 billion in fiscal 2027. Cisco continues to expand AI data center offerings, including Nexus innovations to capture greater market share.

The acquisition of Juniper Networks is reshaping HPE’s mix by expanding its portfolio across campus and branch, data center switching, routing and security. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026, management highlighted that Juniper integration milestones and committed synergies are running ahead of schedule, and the combined go-to-market is already improving share of wallet with enterprise and service provider customers. HPE also launched new autonomous, agentic AI operations capabilities and raised its cumulative Networks for AI order target to at least $2 billion by the end of fiscal 2026, reflecting confidence in AI-driven demand for high-performance networking.

ANET’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Arista have gained 43.4% over the past year against the industry’s decline of 13.9%.

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From a valuation standpoint, Arista trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 16.93, above the industry average of 8.75.

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Earnings estimates for 2026 have increased 11.29% to $4.04 over the past 60 days, while the same for 2027 has also increased 13.7% to $4.98.

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Arista currently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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