Nvidia’s Q1 2026 switching revenue hit $2.1 billion, up 192.7% year over year. That was enough to hand it the top spot in data center Ethernet switching by revenue — a market it didn’t even lead a year ago.
The data comes from IDC’s Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker, released Thursday.
NVDA stock was up 2.95% on the day.
The engine behind the surge is Spectrum-X, Nvidia’s end-to-end AI networking platform. It bundles Spectrum Ethernet switches, BlueField DPUs, and LinkX cables into one integrated stack built for large GPU clusters.
That integration is what’s winning deals. Hyperscalers and AI-native cloud providers building AI factories need networks that can keep up with the scale of modern training and inferencing workloads. Spectrum-X is designed from the ground up to do exactly that.
Paul Nicholson, Research VP at IDC, didn’t mince words: “NVIDIA’s rise to #1 in datacenter Ethernet switching in a single year is one of the most significant vendor landscape shifts IDC has tracked in enterprise networking.”
He added that Spectrum-X is “winning AI factory deals that incumbent networking vendors cannot match with standalone hardware alone.”
The data center switching segment wasn’t just good for Nvidia — it was strong across the board. IDC reported the segment grew 61% year over year to $10 billion in Q1. The overall Ethernet switch market rose 39.8% to $15.4 billion.
AI infrastructure spending is the driver. Both hyperscalers and large enterprises are deploying AI at scale, pushing demand for high-speed, low-latency networking. The campus and branch segment also posted solid gains, up 12.3% to $5.4 billion, supported by a hardware refresh cycle and rising component prices.
Arista (ANET) held the number two position in data center switching and also closed the day up 2.87%. Cisco still leads the overall Ethernet switching market, which covers campus and enterprise as well as data center.
IDC expects strong Ethernet switch market momentum through the rest of 2026, driven by continued AI investment at hyperscalers and enterprises. Demand for 800G and beyond switching is expected to stay robust as inferencing deployments grow alongside training workloads.
Nvidia won’t hold the top spot unchallenged. IDC flagged Cisco, Arista, and Broadcom (AVGO) as vendors likely to step up competitive responses in the data center segment.
On the campus side, IDC noted that revenue growth could slow if memory supply constraints ease and reduce the pricing tailwind that has helped inflate average selling prices recently.
IDC also flagged macro risks — tariffs and regional economic volatility — as factors that could temper spending in some markets.
In Q1, Nvidia’s data center switching revenue accounted for 21.5% of the segment, all of it from data center rather than campus or branch.
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