New York, March 5, 2026, 05:40 (EST)
- Arista shares rose 8.2% on Wednesday and added about 1% in early pre-market trade on Thursday.
- CEO Jayshree Ullal told a Morgan Stanley conference Arista expects to cross $10 billion in revenue this year and put its market opportunity at $105 billion.
- Executives warned memory-chip shortages could linger and said Nvidia is both a partner and a rival in AI networking.
Arista Networks shares climbed 8.2% on Wednesday to close at $134.83, and were up about 1% in early pre-market trade on Thursday. The Santa Clara, California-based networking gear maker has a market value of about $183 billion. 1
The move puts Arista back in focus as investors try to map the next leg of spending tied to artificial intelligence data centres. Switches and routers are plumbing, but when they stall, large AI clusters slow down.
Arista sells Ethernet switches and network software into big cloud operators and fast-growing AI data-center builders. The field is getting more crowded, with Cisco still a major incumbent and Nvidia pushing deeper into Ethernet networking alongside its AI chips.
At a Morgan Stanley technology conference on Tuesday, Chief Executive Jayshree Ullal said Arista’s total addressable market, or TAM — its estimate of the pool of spending it can target — has doubled to $105 billion from $60 billion. She said the company expects to “cross the $10 billion mark this year,” after reporting roughly $9 billion in revenue last year, and flagged the potential for one or two new customers that each contribute about 10% of revenue. 2
Ullal also described Nvidia as a partner on accelerators but a competitor through its Mellanox networking business and bundled platforms such as Spectrum‑X, which aims to tie Ethernet networking closer to GPUs. She pointed to Arista’s 7800 “AI Spine” switch, saying it runs at 800 gigabits per second, and said the company would adopt co-packaged optics — where optical parts are built into switches, not plugged in — once standards are open. But she warned shortages of memory chips used in servers were hitting customers and could become a “two-year problem,” while President and CTO Ken Duda argued “open and interoperable wins” as the next hardware cycle takes shape. 3
Arista posted fourth-quarter revenue of $2.488 billion and full-year 2025 revenue of $9.006 billion, the company said in February. Ullal said the firm delivered “revenue of $9 billion,” while Chief Financial Officer Chantelle Breithaupt cited a quarter “surpassing $1 billion in quarterly net income.” Arista forecast first-quarter revenue of about $2.6 billion. 4
But the rally leaves little room for a pause in cloud spending or a sharper shift toward more proprietary networking stacks around AI chips. Arista last month forecast annual revenue above Wall Street estimates on demand tied to data-center expansion, but that demand can move in waves, and competitors can force tougher pricing. 5
A filing on Wednesday showed director Charles Giancarlo sold 8,000 Arista shares on March 2 under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 plan, which lets insiders trade on a set schedule. The shares sold for between about $127 and $130 each and were held through a family trust, the filing said. 6
Investors will look for proof that Arista’s broader customer base can offset swings at its largest buyers, while supply constraints ease rather than tighten. For now, the stock move says the market is still paying up for clear AI networking exposure.
