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Arista's newly announced rack-scale AI fabric adds a catalyst to the interconnect theme. Arista says its open Ethernet platform supports up to 144 accelerators per rack and cross-rack scaling; Arista joins Marvell and Semtech on the list. Lumentum remains listed despite its sale over a personal cost-basis display issue, with a possible repurchase after the wash-sale period. x.comÂ
Interconnect deserves more exposure as AI rack spending shifts from GPUs toward memory and then networking, per a Jefferies report summarized by @ren_stocks. Networking rises from 8.6% of a GB300 NVL72 rack to 22.4% of a Rubin Ultra NVL576 pod, about $5K to $21K per GPU, because linking racks makes the interconnect part of the computer. Marvell, Lumentum and Semtech are the longs for this theme, with exposure to rise if capital allows. x.comÂ
A potential Lumentum acquisition could let Marvell pair custom AI chips with the optical infrastructure connecting them. Following Celestial AI, it could become one of the few companies offering both, moving toward an AI-focused version of Broadcom; financing a deal this large remains a major concern. x.comÂ
Lumentum's 109% year-on-year growth and sold-out capacity through 2029 make selling its AI optics exposure questionable. Bloomberg reported Marvell is in advanced talks to buy it; the appeal depends on the price, especially when holders of an $80 billion Lumentum would become holders of a $320 billion-plus Marvell growing 37%. x.comÂ
Marvell risks paying a peak-scarcity price for Lumentum if optical supply catches up by 2028-30. The proposed ~$99B deal values Lumentum at roughly 20x guided annualized revenue and 58x estimated after-tax operating income, while Lumentum, Coherent and Chinese suppliers are adding laser capacity. The DSP-and-laser combination has strategic logic, but durable scarcity economics and Nvidia's response remain uncertain. x.comÂ
Arista Networks benefits from the AI interconnect buildout because every transceiver has to plug into a switch. Switch port counts scale with accelerator count, and speed per port climbs on top of that. Arista sells to the handful of cloud titans doing the building, which make up most of its revenue. x.comÂ
Networking, power and compute look more durable than cyclical memory in the AI buildout. Lumentum's revenue compounded year after year across the 2010s and 2020s, unlike Micron's; AWS revenue also compounded. Lumentum, Nebius, Bloom Energy and Credo should heavily outperform SanDisk and Micron from here, though AI itself remains heavily doubted. x.com x.comÂ
Arista is losing share in a record market, a bad combination. Evercore's Q2 Ethernet front-end tracker shows the market at a record $7.3B, up 34% year over year, with cloud up 54% and neoclouds up 208%, yet Arista lost 145bps of front-end share. The tracker doesn't show who gained, though IDC ranked Nvidia's own Ethernet business first in data-center switching revenue in Q1, on a different vendor cut. x.comÂ
Marvell looks well positioned for scale-up compute domains, where interconnect is the wall that limits performance. Scale-up domains should be thought of differently from simply networking racks together, and Marvell's own commentary now focuses on exactly that opportunity. x.com x.comÂ
AI data-center spending flows beyond GPUs and operators into networking, optics, power and cooling. Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Marvell supply chips; Arista, Nokia and Credo connectivity; Applied Optoelectronics and Lumentum optics; Vistra, Constellation and Bloom power; Vertiv and Modine cooling. Meta's $140B spending this year illustrates the scale, per a commenter with whom the point is agreed. x.com x.comÂ
Co-packaged optics standards could make finished transceiver modules smaller and more interchangeable as chip designers build optical engines inside their packages. That is another reason to avoid Lumentum, Coherent and Applied Optoelectronics and prefer Soitec. Lumentum and Coherent now earn a lot from finished modules, leaving them exposed if the architecture changes. x.comÂ
Arista Networks' accelerating revenue and gross profit against relatively flat operating expenses make existing shares hard to sell, and the AI revolution could take them higher down the road. EPS growth is strengthening. After a 20-fold run, P/E expansion from 25 to 58 and P/S from 8 to 22 leave it too expensive to enter now, though the valuation looks justified; the best gains may be over. If growth slows, prolonged consolidation is possible. x.comÂ
