Arista Networks reported its first quarter fiscal 2023 financial earnings on Monday showing continued growth, and providing some guidance on where artificial intelligence (AI) will play a role in the company's future.

For the quarter, Arista reported revenue of $1.35 billion for a 54% year-over-year gain that exceeded the company's guidance expectations. During the company's earnings call, company executives outlined success over the past quarter as it announced a series of updates. Among the first quarter announcements was Arista's product vision for Linear Drive optics that was announced at the OFC 2023 conference in February.

The optics are set to enable connectivity at 800 Gigabit for high speed interconnects. Artista also announced its entry into the WAN space with its CloudVision Pathfinder Service which was announced at the end of March. The new service will be advanced alongside a partnership with Equinix to develop and deploy WAN routing systems.

The big push for Arista though that dominated much of the discussion during the earnings call is how the networking company will benefit from and enable AI. During the earnings call

Jayshree Ullal,  president and CEO of Arista, repeatedly emphasized the importance of high-speed networking for enabling the next generation of AI.

“We expect AI networking to become meaningful throughout the years and through the decade ahead,” Ullal said.

Ullal commented that a key requirement for large AI clusters is a mandate to avoid idle states.

One of the ways to do that is with optimized networking that runs at a high-speed of 400 to 800 gigabits per second. For Arista, the path for enabling AI clusters is with Ethernet, using a combination of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to support a lossless high-performance transport layer.

Ullal said that the Arista 7800 series is her company's flagship AI platform. She noted that Arista's engineering teams have spent a lot of time working to optimize the platform for dealing with different types of AI workloads.

“We do expect AI to be meaningful this year as opposed to not material the last couple of years, and we believe the 7800 will be the flagship product for that,” Ullal said.

During the earnings call, analysts asked about the impact of the upcoming Jerico3AI networking silicon that was announced by Broadcom on April 18. Arista is a Broadcom partner and uses Broadcom silicon in its networking hardware.

Anshul Sadana, senior vice president and chief operating officer at Arista, said that Broadcom has also announced the complementary Tomahawk 5 Network silicon. Sadana said that he expects the market to consume Tomahawk 5 and Jericho3AI silicon as quickly as the market can get them out there. Sadana cautioned that it will take time for those chips to get into the market.

Ullal emphasized that Arista values its partnership with Broadcom. Currently she sees 100 Gig Ethernet as being key for enterprises, 400 Gig for the cloud and  800 gig and beyond for AI use cases.

“In terms of high speed, I think we've now got some killer use cases for 400 and 800 Gig with AI,” she said. “So, you will see our strength with 100, 200, in some cases, and now, 400 and 800 gig, with AI being that killer Application driving our high-speed acceleration.”