Nvidia fell, AMD rose, and the culprit might be Arista Networks?

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On Friday, Nvidia and AMD’s stock prices diverged after the CEO of Arista Networks said on an earnings call that the company is seeing some deployments shift towards AMD.

Nvidia’s share price fell nearly 3% during Friday trading, while AMD rose nearly 1%.

On Thursday night’s earnings call, when asked by analysts about the company’s cooperation with AMD, Arista CEO Ullal said: “A year ago, it was basically 99% Nvidia, right? But today, when we look at deployments, about 20%—maybe even slightly more, about 20% to 25%—of projects are using AMD as the preferred accelerator.”

Although the volatility in Nvidia and AMD stock prices wasn’t huge, Ullal’s comments are significant. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT more than 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 TPUs are also seeing increasing adoption. Nvidia is currently the highest-valued U.S. company, with a market capitalization of over $4.5 trillion. AMD’s market cap is about $335 billion.

Arista’s role in the AI infrastructure wave is to provide Ethernet switching technology to connect high-performance chips. At the end of last year, AMD announced a partnership with Arista to build customized AI clusters for training and inference.

For Arista, this diversification of deployments is largely out of necessity.

Nvidia, by building its own networking technology to connect its powerful GPUs, has reduced the demand for Arista’s technology. In October last year, Nvidia announced that Meta and Oracle would use Nvidia’s networking technology in their ecosystems. This news caused Arista’s stock price to decline by 10% over two days. Analysts commented: “It’s not the end of the world, but obviously, it would be better to be designed in by Nvidia, and now they’re to some extent being designed out—even if not fully excluded.”

Nvidia launched its Spectrum-X Ethernet platform in 2023. Over the following year, Arista’s market capitalization was cut by more than half. The stock rebounded somewhat last year, rising 19%, and is up 6% since 2026.

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