Nvidia’s claim to the world’s top networking company crown just got a Gartner-shaped boost after the analyst firm anointed it the "company to beat" in the AI network fabric space.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proudly proclaimed the chip giant was the “largest networking company in the world” during the GTC event earlier this year. Gartner’s latest report said the vendor “stands out” for its AI accelerator dominance paired with its broad portfolio of data center networking offerings.
Gartner heaped praise on Nvidia’s use of proprietary protocols and features, such as NVLink, which it touted as providing “high performance and reliability” across scale-out and scale-up networking for AI clusters.
Nvidia’s front-runner status might not be as safe as it would like, though. Gartner’s report warned that the demand shift from training to inference, combined with the rise of agentic use cases, could well change the vendor landscape.
The analyst firm also pointed to the rise of big hyperscale customers wanting more open Ethernet-based alternatives. Nvidia does, of course, offer some Ethernet-based offerings, like its Spectrum-X switches, sales of which are believed to be “on par” with those of its InfiniBand lines. IDC only recently suggested that Nvidia has strong-armed a 21.5% slice of the Ethernet switch data center segment, with Spectrum-X demand seeing “significant traction” from hyperscalers and cloud providers building so-called AI factories.
Gartner also billed Nvidia’s product and go-to-market (GTM) strategy as “lack[ing] alignment” with the mainstream enterprise market. Should it lose the hyperscale race to more open alternatives, that could open the door to a number of traditional networking rivals already circling, like Arista, Cisco, and Marvell.
Of that rival trio, Marvell was listed as the company to beat for AI data center optical connectivity. Huang himself crowned it the “next trillion-dollar company,” with Gartner adding to the pile of praise, describing Marvell’s end-to-end offerings as making it the brand to beat.
Marvell’s offerings already span digital signal processor (DSP)-based pluggables and analog optical components, and the vendor is planning to expand into scale-up co-packaged optics (CPO) for scale-up networking, an effort set to be aided by its $3.25 billion Celestial AI tech acquisition.
To close the gap, Gartner said competitors like Ayar Labs, Nvidia, and even Broadcom need to target integration or offer differentiated architectures.
A potential challenge to Marvell’s success, though, could be CPO execution risk. With the market still emerging, it remains to be seen whether the technology is fully ready to make the leap to actual deployments. Microsoft is among the hyperscale players still toying with photonic interconnects, with the cloud giant on a hiring spree to build out related engineering teams.
The potential rise of alternative photonic architectures, such as near-packaged optics (NPO), where the optical engines are embedded on the printed circuit board (PCB) immediately adjacent to the chip rather than on the same substrate or package, could also hamper Marvell’s CPO efforts, the analyst firm warns.
AMD the brand to beat for CPUs, Broadcom the custom silicon king #
If Nvidia is winning on the network side, then AMD is the king of server central processing units (CPUs), the report suggests. The chip giant was touted as the company to beat for enterprise AI processors due to its consolidation capabilities, agentic AI orchestration tools, and I/O bandwidth. Gartner praised the Lisa Su-led outfit ahead of its Advancing AI event in San Francisco for “consistent roadmap execution” and broad ecosystem support.
Having eaten into a portion of the once Intel-dominated market, AMD’s EPYC line has time and again been popular among virtual machine (VM) vendors, finding homes in units like Microsoft Azure’s Da/Ea/Fasv7-series VMs that debuted earlier this year. Its standard server-grade lines are also routinely supported by edge-centric subsets to bring inference and computing closer to applications, like via the Embedded 4005 series.
AMD finds itself as the Gartner-crowned frontrunner for an enterprise AI server CPU market that’s becoming increasingly diverse. The vendor and x86 stalwart Intel find themselves facing rising competition from Nvidia, through that vendor's earlier Grace and forthcoming Vera CPUs, and Arm’s AGI chip.
AMD also looks set to face challenges from hyperscalers wanting their own custom silicon, with Meta's MTIA, OpenAI’s Jalapeño, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Graviton among the high-end hardware set to form the basis of integrated stacks.
Helping develop a sizable portion of those custom silicon projects is Broadcom, with Garner lauding it as the company to beat for AI general processing units (XPUs).
The likes of Anthropic, Google, and Apple join OpenAI and Meta as having signed mammoth contracts with Broadcom to design custom AI accelerators. The analyst firm touted its leading-edge process nodes, advanced packaging, memory tech, and die-to-die interconnects as means for boosting its application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design efforts.
For competitors to compete with Broadcom CEO Hock Tan’s custom silicon empire, Gartner said rivals would have to improve “weaknesses” in their intellectual property portfolio and offer flexible engagements with system-level designs to close the gap. “To better compete, tech provider executives should also address AI portfolio shortcomings by collaborating with third-party IP suppliers, open industry consortiums, or acquiring the necessary technology,” the report reads.