On Friday, the stock prices of NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices showed divergent trends after the CEO of Arista Networks indicated during an earnings call that the company is observing a shift in some deployments toward AMD. NVIDIA's stock fell nearly 3% during Friday's trading session, while AMD's shares rose close to 1%.
During Thursday evening's earnings call, when questioned by an analyst about the company's collaboration with AMD, Arista CEO Ullal stated: "A year ago, it was basically 99% NVIDIA, right? Today, when we examine deployment patterns, AMD is becoming the accelerator of choice in approximately 20%, or slightly higher, around 20% to 25% of projects."
Although the fluctuations in NVIDIA and AMD stock prices were not extreme, Ullal's comments carry substantial significance. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT over three years ago, sparking the artificial intelligence industry's rapid growth, NVIDIA has dominated the AI GPU market.
Currently, NVIDIA holds approximately 90% of the AI chip market share, with potential challengers including AMD and Google. Google's TPU is also gaining increasing adoption. NVIDIA is now the highest-valued company in the United States, with a market capitalization exceeding $4.5 trillion. AMD's market capitalization stands at about $335 billion.
Arista's role in the AI infrastructure wave involves providing Ethernet switching technology to connect high-performance chips. AMD announced a partnership with Arista late last year to build customized AI clusters capable of handling both training and inference tasks.
For Arista, diversification in deployments has become largely necessary. NVIDIA's development of its own networking technology to connect its powerful GPUs has reduced the demand for Arista's solutions. In October of last year, NVIDIA announced that Meta and Oracle would adopt NVIDIA's networking technology within their ecosystems. This news previously caused Arista's stock to drop 10% over two days. One analyst remarked: "It's not the end of the world, but clearly, it's more advantageous to be included in NVIDIA's design framework. Now they are being partially designed out, if not entirely excluded."
NVIDIA introduced its Spectrum-X Ethernet platform in 2023. In the following year, Arista's market value contracted by more than half. The stock recovered somewhat last year, rising 19%, and has gained 6% since the beginning of 2026.
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