Data Center Switch Revenue Up 64.5% in One Quarter
IDC’s Q2 2026 numbers, dissected by The Next Platform on September 20, put a hard figure on a trend the industry has been narrating qualitatively for two years: data center Ethernet switch revenue hit $12.3 billion, up 64.5% year-on-year, even as the segment shipped fewer than half of all switch ports sold. Translation: AI-cluster switching has become dramatically more expensive per port than everything else on the network.
The clearest evidence is at the top of the speed curve
Switches with 800 Gb/sec ports — sold almost exclusively into data centers — saw revenue jump 6.1 fold year-on-year to $5.07 billion, with 800G’s share of data center ports climbing from 35.9% in Q1 to 41.2% in Q2. “Scale-up represents what could be the largest total addressable market expansion the industry has ever seen,” Dell’Oro Group vice president Sameh Boujelbene wrote in the firm’s networking outlook, describing Ethernet’s push beyond scale-out AI clusters into scale-up territory long dominated by Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink.
By vendor, Nvidia’s data center Ethernet revenue nearly tripled year-on-year on Spectrum-X attach rates tied to its DGX and NVL72 systems, while Cisco grew 77.3% to $2.24 billion and Arista Networks (still the larger of the two in this segment) grew 37.9% to $2.3 billion.
Bottom line: The dollar figures may be understating the real gap. Analyst Timothy Prickett Morgan calculates that data centers are shipping roughly 6.2 times more server compute cores than comparable-speed switch ports – a mismatch that, left unaddressed, means the industry’s networking spend is falling behind its compute spend even as GPU utilization becomes the metric every operator is being judged on.
