Evercore: Continues to be bullish on Arista, or becomes Meta's partner in a network of over 100,000 GPU training clusters

According to the financial news app Zhitong Finance, based on the analysis by the Wall Street investment firm Evercore ISI, Arista Networks (ANET.US) is likely to become the networking partner for the large-scale model training cluster that Meta Platforms (META.US) is about to establish. This training cluster is expected to be supported by over 100,000 GPUs, with most of them likely being Nvidia's H100 model. This news drove Arista's stock price up nearly 4% on Thursday. If Arista can successfully secure this contract, it will help the company achieve its $750 million AI revenue target by 2025. Evercore maintains an "outperform" rating for Arista and continues to hold a target stock price as high as $400.

It is reported that Meta is making final adjustments to its training cluster, which will be used to train its Llama 4 large language models. This massive project is expected to be equipped with $2 billion worth of chips. Since InfiniBand technology cannot meet the needs of such a large-scale cluster, the cluster will be interconnected using Ethernet, leading Evercore to speculate that Arista Networks may provide some of the infrastructure.

Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani pointed out in Thursday's report that if GPUs account for 80% of the total expenditure on the AI cluster, the total cost could reach $25 billion, with 10% possibly allocated to infrastructure. He further analyzed, "If Arista can win this business, it could mean a revenue opportunity of $250 million."

Evercore also noted that Meta had previously used Arista's switches to network a cluster containing 24,000 GPUs. Daryanani added, "Given Arista's close collaboration with Meta, we believe they are very likely to provide the switch infrastructure for this new cluster."