Well, InfiniBand is already a public specification. Nvidia’s products are the leaders in that space. So much so that some customers are hesitant to use it since there aren’t good second sourcing options. Nvidia bought Infiniband leader Mellanox back in 2019, as Huang was already seeing that networking bandwidth was going to be key for AI data flows. That was pretty expensive (they had to beat out other companies), but clearly was a very good acquisition (all cash, not stock, btw).
ANET doesn’t work with InfiniBand. They’re Ethernet only, as is just about everyone else.
Nvidia’s Spectrum-X products (Ethernet Switches, BlueField-3 SuperNIC, and LinkX transceivers and cables) are hardware products and unique to Nvidia, although compatible, as the name implies, with Ethernet. This is Huang pushing on multiple fronts. He’s already acknowledged that the upcoming “Ultra Ethernet” standard may be suitable for AI training workloads, and is even starting to put out networking products for companies that want to stay 100% Ethernet. The Ultra Ethernet consortium was created by Broadcom and other companies specifically to thwart the rise of Nvidia’s InfiniBand networking, so they’ve excluded Nvidia, but I suspect Nvidia can still adopt the standard when it’s time.
So, we see that Nvidia already is in the networking business. Matter of fact, Nvidia makes over 4 times as much money in networking alone as AMD does in all of its AI products, and 2 times as money in networking alone as ANET does in all its businesses.
Nvidia’s networking business is at a $13 billion annualized revenue run rate.
That all said, I don’t know much about how Nvidia impacts Arista. This video claims to present an understanding (and may be worth watching just to have networking and Arista’s business model explained to you), but in the end doesn’t say much about the competition:
I would think that long-term, ethernet is still here to stay and that companies coming out with Ultra Ethernet products are going to do well. That said, Artista’s revenue growth guidance is barely double-digits, so not the kind of growth company in which this board is interested.