Arista Networks President and CEO Jayshree Ural
Scott Mullin | CNBC
shares of Nvidia and advanced micro device moved in the opposite direction on Friday after the CEO of Arista Networks She told investors that her company is moving some of its deployments to AMD.
Nvidia stock fell nearly 3%, while AMD rose nearly 1%.
“A year ago, it was almost 99% Nvidia, right?” Ural said on Arista’s earnings call late Thursday, when asked by an analyst about the company’s work with AMD. “If you look at our adoption now, AMD is becoming the preferred accelerator of choice at about 20%, maybe a little more, 20% to 25%.”
While the stock price move wasn’t dramatic, Ural’s comments are noteworthy since Nvidia has dominated the graphics processing unit (GPU) market in the AI space since the industry took off with the announcement of OpenAI’s ChatGPT a little more than three years ago.
Nvidia currently commands about 90% of the AI chip market, but could potentially face challenges from AMD as well as AMD. googletensor processing units are gaining increasing attention. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the United States, with a market capitalization of more than $4.5 trillion. AMD, whose stock has risen 85% in the past 12 months, is now worth about $335 billion.
Arista’s role in the AI infrastructure boom is to provide the Ethernet switching technology that connects powerful chips. AMD announced late last year that it would partner with Arista to build customized AI clusters that can be used for training and inference.
However, in the case of Arista, much of the diversification of deployment has been done out of necessity.
Nvidia reduced the need for Arista’s technology by building its own networking technology to link its own powerful GPUs. In October, NVIDIA said: meta and oracle The company plans to adopt the company’s network technology into its own ecosystem, an announcement that helped send Arista’s stock price down 10% in two days.
“It’s not the end of the world, but obviously it helps that it’s designed at Nvidia, to some degree, if not completely,” Ben Bajarin, an analyst who covers chips at Creative Strategies, told CNBC in an email Friday.
Nvidia launched its Spectrum-X Ethernet platform in 2023, but Arista lost more than half of its value the following year. The stock rebounded slightly last year, rising 19%, and is on track to rise 6% in 2026.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment. AMD did not respond to requests for comment.
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