This tech upstart is going after a piece of Nvidia’s AI business: Needham
New product initiatives from Arista Networks could put the company on a clear path to rival artificial intelligence darling Nvidia and others, according to Needham. Analyst Ryan Koontz, who has a buy rating on the network equipment name, increased his price target on Tuesday to $160 from $155. That reflects around 10% upside from Monday’s close. “At its Analyst Day Arista management laid out … a compelling vision for the continued transformation of the company, outlining new Cloud/AI capabilities” that target Nvidia, the analyst wrote. “We also gained strong appreciation for key new senior management hires whom we see as capable of driving the rate of change necessary to expand the company’s dominant lanes.” The analyst also cited Arista’s announcement for plans to “develop a scale-up product built on the newly released Tomahawk Ultra chip from Broadcom .” Such a development would position Arista to compete with Nvidia in the scale-up network market as opposed to the AI chip market, Koontz said. “NVIDIA currently has the dominant product in scale-up networks, with new prospective Ethernet solutions from Broadcom and AMD,” he said. “We expect Arista to complete design for its new scale-up in 2026 and enter major trials in 2027 ahead of a volume shipment ramp.” Koontz added that Arista became a major new supplier to Anthropic in 2025. He expects that to meaningfully contribute to the company’s revenue growth next year. ANET 6M mountain ANET, 6-month Most analysts are bullish on Arista, with 23 out of 28 analysts covering it having a strong buy or buy rating, per LSEG data. The remaining five have a hold rating. Needham’s bullish outlook on the stock comes as it has soared in recent months. Over the past six months, shares have risen nearly 72%, outpacing the S & P 500’s 17% gain during that same period. The stock has also jumped almost 51% over the past three months.
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