ANET · Earnings call · 2026Q3T · Full report

Product Launch and Transition

Arista Networks, Inc. · 2026-11-03 · Importance 38 · Surprise 42

Arista said its Etherlink portfolio includes at least 25 switches designed for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across AI fabrics. At the October 2026 Open Compute Project conference, it showcased rack scale-up designs developed with accelerator partners including Arm, Microsoft Maia, AMD Helios, Qualcomm and Meta MTIA. Scale-up trials are expected to begin in 2027, with production expected in 2028; management said scale-up would not contribute materially in 2027. Arista also described its open CPO approach using socketed optical engines and pigtail fibers, while expecting pluggable optics to remain widely deployed and CPO to arrive in the 2028–2030 timeframe.

Key facts

• Arista expected open CPO and near-packaged optics to come to market in the 2028 to 2030 timeframe; it said adoption was not imminent and did not plan to build proprietary co-packaged optics.
• Arista has turned AVA on as an alpha feature for customer trial within its CloudVision service and is working on pricing models.
• Arista expects 2027, like 2026, to be filled with many new products and use cases.
• Arista said it was working on three rack-scale designs: orthogonal, cabled backplane and cross-rack.
• Arista's Etherlink portfolio includes at least 25 switches for scale-up, scale-out and scale-across.
• At the October 2026 Open Compute Project conference, Arista showcased rack scale-up designs developed with AI accelerator partners.
• Arista said many switches in the rack-scale designs are liquid-cooled.
• Arista's EOS process isolation allows a targeted fix to be installed without a maintenance window or network disruption.