GenAI 热潮推动以太网交换机市场加速增长与转型

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The server market is exploding thanks to the GenAI boom, and the Ethernet switch and router markets are finally starting to respond in sympathy with good growth. But don’t get too excited. It probably won’t be able to grow as fast as it might because of component shortages, but then again, demand outstripping supply and creating its own kind of rise thanks to price increases.

It is a good time to be pricing out any kind of semiconductor. You can just get a red grease pencil and scratch out an old price and write down a newer high price because you feel like it. What is anyone gonna do about it?

In the second quarter, which is the latest one for which IDC has market data compiled, switch revenues rose by 43.4 percent to $18.91 billion, which was also a 23.1 percent growth sequentially from switch sales Q1 2026.

The router market, which has been under pressure for more than a decade as more and more routing functions are added to Ethernet switch ASICs, also managed to grow very nicely, up 22.8 percent to $4.51 billion in the period and up 20.1 percent sequentially. Yes, companies such as service providers, telcos, neoclouds, and others that cannot write their own routing software for Ethernet switches – as they hyperscalers and cloud builders do – still buy routers. We don’t spend a lot of time looking at the routers from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Huawei Technology, Nokia, Ericsson, and a few others, but their routing gear is still important for a lot of enterprises. It is not at the heart of the system even if it is what links the datacenter to the outside world at a lot of companies.

Let’s take a look at Ethernet switching in general, and then drill down into the datacenter portion of the market that The Next Platform cares about.

Her’s the overall revenue chart by vendor supplied by IDC:

This is an interesting chart of sales by vendor, but it is very hard to see the trend lines for each vendor, and it does not provide more than five quarters of data so you can’t really get a feel for just how much more money is being spent on Ethernet switchery compared to the past.

So let’s be clear: This is record sales for Ethernet switches, and it is not only because of GenAI systems in the datacenters, but because edge and campus networks have to be upgraded to feed into GenAI systems.

The public IDC dataset for the Ethernet switch market only goes back to the third quarter of 2013, so we cannot see what happened before, during, and after the Dot Com boom, the Dot Com bust, or the Great Recession, three of the big economic events that changed buying patterns. We can see the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 through 2022, and we are seeing the effect of the GenAI boom.

Here is a much better Ethernet switch chart by vendors, so you can see who is rising and who is falling:

And here is the table that runs from 2024 through Q2 2026 that gives you the numbers behind portions of those lines shown above:

Cisco’s overall Ethernet revenues grew by 36.2 percent to $5.43 billion in Q2 2026, but Nvidia grew by 2.8X thanks to its enormous GenAI systems business and its attachment rate for its Spectrum-X switches for scaling out its DGX server nodes and its NVL72 rackscale systems.

Nvidia’s $3.86 billion dwarfed Cisco nemesis Arista Networks, which grew 37.6 percent to $2.53 billion. Even after eating Juniper Networks, the Ethernet switch business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise only grew by 6.1 percent to $1.15 billion. Still, that is a lot of incremental business for HPE, whose Ethernet business was largely wireless stuff under the Aruba brand. Huawei Technology has been jockeying with HPE for the past several years, and this quarter it came out ahead with $1.55 billion in revenues, up 28.6. IDC is no longer providing figures for the collective original design manufacturers (ODMs), but I estimate they raked in $3.56 billion, up 2.43X year on year. The other vendors in the market have seen their market share tank, provided my ODM number is correct.

Of course, we are less interested in campus and edge networking than what goes on inside the datacenter, and luckily, IDC provides a split between these two categories:

To be fair, IDC used to give out revenues and port counts for datacenter and campus/edge Ethernet switch sales, and stopped talking about ports after Q2 2022. I have been doing my best to fill in the gap since then.

In Q2, datacenter Ethernet switch revenues totaled $12.3 billion, up 64.5 percent year on year and up 23 percent sequentially. I reckon that around 129.5 million ports were sold into the datacenter market for scale up, scale out, and scale across networks – and mostly for scale out. (This will change.) The datacenter comprised 65.1 percent of revenues and 42.8 percent of ports shipped, in my augmentation of IDC’s data.

When you drill down into the switch port speeds, anything above 200 Gb/sec is very likely for datacenter use cases, while 100 Gb/sec and 10 Gb/sec networks are split between datacenter and campus/edge use cases.

In the quarter, sales of switches with 800 Gb/sec ports were exclusively sold for datacenter use cases, and revenues rose by 6.1X year on year to $5.07 billion, which was a 41.5 sequential increase. IDC gave us a hint that in the datacenter sector that 35.9 percent of ports shipping in Q1 2026 were from 800 Gb/sec switches, and in Q2 2026, this rose to 41.2 percent of all datacenter switch ports. There is a huge wave of adoption for 800 Gb/sec in GenAI clusters, and interestingly, the cost per port is coming here as the hyperscalers and cloud builders negotiate hard for discounts and vendors make the revenue up in volume even as there are shortages of components. I reckon there were 35.3 million 800 Gb/sec ports sold in Q1 2026 and 54.3 million sold in Q2 2026.

Sales of Ethernet switches with 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec ports, which are pretty much only sold for datacenter use cases, rose by 71.6 percent to $6.35 billion. I reckon that 35.8 million ports running at these speeds were sold in Q2.

The prices per port for 800 Gb/sec or 200/400 Gb/sec switches came down a little bit in my model, but not by much. The number of ports on machines is growing as machines with 51.2 Tb/sec and 102.4 Tb/sec ASICs are coming to market, and that is driving up switch revenues as customer hunt for higher radix, higher bandwidth, or both in their switches. And it won’t be long before 1.6 Tb/sec switches are ramping in volume for high-end GenAI systems and low latency Ethernet with UALink or ESUN protocols becomes an alternative to Nvidia’s NVLink/NVSwitch combo.

Let’s drill down into the datacenter part of the overall Ethernet market now. This is where most of the action is. Here is a plot showing the top three vendors plus the ODM collective:

And here is a table that shows the data since Q1 2023:

If my number for the ODM collective is right, then Nvidia outgrew the ODMs in scale out Ethernet, and if that number is too high – meaning that sales among other vendors outside of the top four in the datacenter – Nvidia, Cisco, Arista, and HPE did not drop off a cliff like I think it did – then the gap between Nvidia and the ODMs is even larger. As we pointed out above, Nvidia nearly tripled its Ethernet switch sales in the datacenter, according to IDC. HPE grew by a nice 2.1X, but that was still only $345 million – less than one-tenth of what Nvidia is getting peddling scale out Ethernet in the datacenter.

Cisco grew datacenter Ethernet sales by a very good 77.3 percent on Q2, but still only brought in $2.24 billion. (This number neglects the revenue that Cisco gets selling its Silicon One ASICs to the hyperscalers and cloud builders who have the ODMs make their homegrown switchery.) Arista Networks is still marginally larger than Cisco, with growth of 37.9 percent to $2.3 billion, says IDC.

Just for fun, here are two more charts. The first one plots out server revenues from IDC against switch revenues:

The blue line is when IDC stopped giving out server revenues in its public statements, so we just don't know.

The rapidly growing server market, which is being expanded by the GenAI boom and expensive server nodes and rackscale systems laden with GPUs and high speed scale up networks, which are not included in the IDC Ethernet data, is only just now helping to lift the switch market.

Here is a parallel chart that shows server core counts versus switch ports above 10 Gb/sec speeds over time, which shows a similar trend:

In Q2 2026, I estimate that there were 6.2X more server cores sold than switch ports at those speeds (this is all switch ports, not just datacenter ports, because not all servers are in the datacenter). It is not hard to conjecture that companies are not spending enough on networking to balance out their compute. This happens all the time, and people wonder why their server utilization is so low.

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October 1, 2026

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