By Nate Wolf
Arista Networks stock spiked Thursday, though the catalyst for its big move wasn't immediately clear.
Shares of the networking company, which sells solutions for artificial-intelligence data centers, surged 10% to $140.53 on Thursday. It was the top performer in the S&P 500.
Sell-side analysts told Barron's Thursday they were still looking for a definitive trigger, but interest in the stock didn't come out of nowhere, said Ryan Koontz of Needham & Co.
"I've been aware of increasing buy-side interest going long in the stock for the past month or two," Koontz told Barron's. "Scale across AI backend networking is widely seen as growing faster than overall AI spend due to power grid limitations. [Arista] is highly exposed to the backend spine switching application."
The stock has become increasingly unpredictable over the last few months. Its beta -- a common measure of volatility -- is 1.99 across the last 90 days, meaning the shares have been about twice as volatile as the broader market. That number is up from 1.74 in the last year and 1.55 in the last five years.
A leader in ethernet, Arista Networks was a Barron's stock pick in June 2025 and has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 35% since then.
Shares of Ciena, which specializes in optical networking, were down 2.2% on Thursday. Cisco Systems, which makes both optical and ethernet solutions, rose 1%.
Write to Nate Wolf at nate.wolf@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 22, 2026 10:53 ET (15:53 GMT)
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