Arista Networks Gets Upgraded. AI Hyperscalers Could Push the Stock to a Record. -- Barrons.com

Dow Jones04-08

By Kit Norton

Arista Networks stock advanced Tuesday after receiving a bullish upgrade. Rosenblatt Securities says the company's relationships with major AI hyperscalers should see a big payoff soon.

Arista Networks broadly sells solutions for artificial-intelligence data centers and counts Meta Platforms and Microsoft among among its clients.

Rosenblatt Securities analyst Mike Genovese on Tuesday upgraded Arista Networks to a Buy rating, up from Neutral and hiked his price target to $180, compared to the earlier $165. The new target represents 42% upside for Arista shares from Monday's closing price of $126.25 -- and is 9% higher than its record close of $164.94, which it hit on Oct. 30, 2025.

Genovese based this bullish view primarily on Arista's XPO, or eXtra-dense Pluggable Optics, strategy, which is a next-generation networking approach unveiled in March 2026 to address the extreme thermal, power, and density requirements of hyperscale AI data centers.

Given Arista's deferred revenue balance of $5.4 billion, the XPO strategy, and expected new large customer wins, revenue growth can exceed guidance for 25% in 2026 and 20% in 2027, the analyst says. Arista previously said it could gain a large customer this year, which Rosenblatt is betting is Google.

"We believe Arista could potentially grow topline closer to 40% in both years as it maintains high share at MSFT and META and gains share at AI networking architectural leader Google," Genovese wrote.

He predicts that Microsoft "will be a n early" adopter of Arista's XPO and linear pluggable optics, or LPO, strategy deployments and that Anthropic could follow suit. Keeping Meta and Microsoft as customers is also key, he added.

Arista Networks stock advanced 3% to $130.02 on Tuesday. For comparison, the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both fell 0.9%.

Write to Kit Norton at kit.norton@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.

 

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April 07, 2026 13:30 ET (17:30 GMT)

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