What Did Arista Networks Stock Investors Miss Before The Run?

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Arista Networks (ANET) stock returned 53.1% in the twelve months to November 12, 2026, against 12.2% for the S&P 500. The shares had already risen 38.7% in the six months before that stretch began. Arista’s sales growth accelerated over that year, and management credited its latest quarter’s growth to AI and enterprise customers. How early did Arista tell investors where its growth would come from?

Arista Set An AI Sales Goal In February 2025

On its February 2025 call, covering fiscal Q4 2024, management committed to $750 million of sales into AI back-end clusters in 2025. That goal was about a tenth of the $7.0 billion Arista sold in fiscal 2024, large enough to check against every report that followed. Management also expected its 800 gigabit Ethernet gear to start appearing in AI back-end clusters that year. Nine months before that stretch began, you could already hold the company to a dollar figure for its AI business.

Arista’s Sales Growth Picked Up Through Mid-2025

Arista’s revenue grew 25.3% from a year earlier in the quarter ended December 2024. That growth accelerated in each of the next two quarters, reaching 30.4% in the quarter ended June 2025. During its August 5, 2025 call, management described its back-end AI sales as “all incremental revenue and incremental market share” for Arista, representing business that came on top of what it already sold.

Yet the fall of 2025 made those signs harder to trust. Arista shares fell 8.9% in a single day in September 2025 after the company’s analyst day, where management projected sales growth at a 20% compounded annual rate between fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2026. Growth then slowed to 27.5% in the quarter ended September 2025. When Arista reported that quarter in early November, the stock slid nearly 9% as investors reacted to management’s cautious commentary on near-term cloud spending. Read today, the AI goal and the rising growth look clear, but in the weeks before the stretch began they arrived alongside two sharp falls in the stock.

Is Arista’s Sales Growth Still Speeding Up?

So far, yes. Arista’s revenue growth rose in each quarter since, from 28.9% in the quarter ended December 2025 to 58.5% in the quarter ended September 2026. Management called that the largest year-over-year growth in the company’s history as a public company. Arista was not the only one rewarded, though: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies both more than doubled over the same twelve months, which suggests investors repriced the whole group rather than Arista alone. Arista’s gain trailed both of them, while Cisco Systems rose 44.9%.

Management expects AI networking to be its fastest-growing business, with sales doubling to about $7 billion in 2027, out of total revenue it guides at about $18.5 billion. That would make AI more than a third of Arista’s sales. Its outlook for fiscal 2027 is revenue growth of 38% to 40%, a forecast rather than a result. That would be slower than the 48% growth management now expects for fiscal 2026.

The AI signs were public well before November 2025, and Arista’s growth has kept rising since. Arista’s year-over-year revenue growth is the measure to watch when it next reports in February 2027.

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