Arista revenue jumps 58.5% to $3.66 billion, a record

Arista's third quarter stands out against its own recent history: Ullal noted that just five years ago, in 2021, the company reported $2.9 billion in revenue for the entire year. The quarter's growth, which she called the largest since Arista went public, reflects a shift in what AI workloads demand from the network. Ullal described a migration from highly centralized training compute to disaggregated and distributed inference, prefill, and decode, which she said requires more intelligent networking and colocation of compute, storage, and KV cache resources rather than raw flops.

Alongside the earnings, executives outlined where the spending is going. R&D rose by a little more than $130 million in the quarter year over year, which CTO Ken Duda framed as roughly 9%–11% of revenue, tied to new AI work, hyperscale partnering, and a liquid-cooling technology introduction. On security, Duda said Arista has been collaborating with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others to integrate new AI-enabled security capabilities from frontier models into its existing software security pipeline, while noting the company has kept CVE counts below 100 over the last two decades.

On the enterprise side, COO Todd Nightingale said customers increasingly treat campus and branch networks as mission-critical, a shift he said has accelerated because of the Glasswing and Mythos effect. He credited EOS and Arista's software uptime as the differentiation driving market-share gains, with the company carrying a campus revenue target of more than $1.25 billion for the year.