Nvidia booked $2.1 billion in datacenter Ethernet switch revenue in Q1 2026, up 2.9X year on year, and in doing so passed both Cisco and Arista Networks to become the number one supplier of datacenter Ethernet switches, according to IDC data. That figure covers Spectrum-X switches only — no cables, no NICs, no DPUs, a detail IDC confirmed directly. Arista landed at $2.07 billion, up 40.1 percent. Cisco took $1.78 billion, up 43.2 percent. Nvidia doesn't just lead; it's pulling away from the two incumbents that defined this market for two decades.

The broader numbers are just as stark. Overall Ethernet switch sales — switches only — rose 39.8 percent to $15.36 billion in Q1, outpacing the server market's 30.4 percent growth to $122.62 billion. Datacenter Ethernet alone climbed 61 percent to just over $10 billion. Edge and campus gear managed 12.3 percent growth to $5.35 billion.

Some of that revenue lift is price, not volume. A fair portion of the increases traces to higher component prices, particularly switches with embedded DRAM for auxiliary storage — a knock-on effect of the memory squeeze now rippling through the whole supply chain.

How firm is Nvidia's lead?

Firmer than the headline suggests. As far as can be determined, Nvidia first took the top datacenter spot back in Q2 2025. In Q4 2025, it beat Cisco but trailed Arista. Q1 2026 marks the first quarter it cleared both. And remember, Nvidia ships only datacenter gear, while Arista and Cisco also sell into edge and campus — so the datacenter segment is where the AI buildout actually shows up in vendor rankings.

What about routers?

Routers keep plugging along despite modern switch ASICs from Broadcom, Marvell, and Cisco folding routing functions into silicon. Router revenue rose 11.3 percent to $3.75 billion in Q1. Service providers and IDC's "cloud SPs" accounted for $2.9 billion of that — 77.2 percent of the market — growing 12.9 percent. Plain enterprises stretched their upgrade cycles again, eking out $867 million, up just 6.1 percent. Geographically, the Americas grew 19.6 percent, EMEA 9.8 percent, Asia/Pacific 2.8 percent. If IT infrastructure is an arms race, the United States is winning it emphatically.

Where is port speed heading?

To 800 Gb/sec, fast. Switches with native 800 Gb/sec ports posted $3.58 billion in Q1 sales, a 10.3X jump year on year, though down 14.3 percent sequentially — a normal Q1 pattern. They now represent 35.8 percent of datacenter Ethernet sales. Native 200/400 Gb/sec gear holds another 34.1 percent, at $3.41 billion, down 10.4 percent year on year and off 52 percent sequentially.

The economics explain the stampede. A native 800 Gb/sec port costs roughly 61 cents per Gb/sec on estimated port counts, versus 53 cents for blended 200/400 Gb/sec ports. Native 100 Gb/sec ports cost twice that; 10 Gb/sec ports more than double; and 1 Gb/sec ports run $10 to $11 per Gb/sec. Port counts appear to have risen 22X, meaning cost per bit has been cut by more than half in a year — competitive pressure and silicon advancement working in tandem.

IDC has also changed how it discloses this data, moving quarterly Ethernet figures from press releases to blog posts and dropping ODM sales from the discussion, which forces analysts to estimate white-box shipments. Some caution applies to any vendor-share table built on that foundation.

With 1.6 Tb/sec and 3.2 Tb/sec ports now on vendors' roadmaps, and inference workloads pushing GenAI beyond InfiniBand-centric training clusters, Ethernet's growth curve looks set to track AI compute spending for several more quarters — at prices per bit that keep falling.