Evercore sees ‘high probability’ Meta 100K+ cluster networked by Arista

Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani notes that The Information reported this morning that Meta (META) is “putting the finishing touches” on a model training cluster that will exceed 100,000 GPUs and pointed out that the story notes the cluster will be networked by Ethernet because InfiniBand cannot handle clusters of this scale. While the report does not say who is providing the Ethernet switches, the firm thinks “there is a high probability” that it is Arista Networks (ANET). As the story notes the GPUs alone could cost about $2B, and assuming GPUs represent 80% of total spend on an AI cluster, this would imply total cost of around $2.5B, of which 10% is likely spent on switching infrastructure, so this could represent a $250M revenue opportunity if Arista won the business, says Evercore, which has an Outperform rating and $400 price target on Arista shares.