NVIDIA falls, AMD rises, the culprit may be Arista Networks?
During the earnings call on Thursday evening, when asked by analysts about the company's collaboration with AMD, Arista CEO Ullal stated, "A year ago, it was basically 99% NVIDIA, right? And today, when we look at the deployment situation, about 20%, or even slightly more, around 20% to 25% of the projects are making AMD the preferred accelerator." NVIDIA's stock price fell nearly 3% during intraday trading on Friday, while AMD rose nearly 1%
On Friday, the stock prices of NVIDIA and AMD showed divergence, after the CEO of Arista Networks stated during the earnings call that the company is seeing some deployments shifting towards AMD.
NVIDIA's stock price fell nearly 3% during intraday trading on Friday, while AMD rose nearly 1%.
During the earnings call on Thursday evening, when asked by analysts about the company's collaboration with AMD, Arista CEO Ullal stated, "A year ago, it was basically 99% NVIDIA, right? And today, when we look at the deployment situation, about 20%, or even slightly more, around 20% to 25% of the projects are now favoring AMD as the preferred accelerator."
Although the fluctuations in NVIDIA and AMD's stock prices are not significant, Ullal's comments are highly meaningful. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT over three years ago and the AI industry took off, NVIDIA has dominated the AI GPU market.
Currently, NVIDIA holds about 90% of the AI chip market share, with potential challengers including AMD and Google. Google's TPU is also gaining increasing adoption. NVIDIA is currently the highest-valued company in the U.S., with a market capitalization exceeding $4.5 trillion. AMD's market capitalization is approximately $335 billion.
Arista's role in the AI infrastructure wave is to provide Ethernet switching technology for connecting high-performance chips. AMD announced a partnership with Arista at the end of last year to build customized AI clusters for training and inference.
For Arista, diversifying its deployments is largely a necessity.
NVIDIA has reduced the demand for Arista's technology by building its own networking technology to connect its powerful GPUs. In October of last year, NVIDIA announced that Meta and Oracle would adopt NVIDIA's networking technology within its ecosystem. This news caused Arista's stock price to drop 10% within two days. Some analysts commented, "This is not the end of the world, but clearly, it would be more beneficial if they were included in NVIDIA's design system, and now they are somewhat being designed out, even if not completely excluded."
NVIDIA launched its Spectrum-X Ethernet platform in 2023. In the following year, Arista's market value shrank by more than half at one point. The stock rebounded last year, rising 19%, and has increased by 6% since 2026
