Nvidia continues its meteoric networking march with a new report suggesting it’s now the number one vendor in the Ethernet switching space.

IDC’s Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker detailed that the first quarter of 2026 saw Nvidia market share surge 192.7% year over year (YoY) to $2.1 billion. That gives it a 21.5% share of the data center segment, while also putting it as the top vendor by revenue.

Demand for its Spectrum-X offerings for ongoing AI infrastructure buildouts helped the chip giant secure sizable market share, with IDC citing “significant traction” from hyperscalers and cloud providers building so-called AI factories.

“Nvidia’s rise to #1 in data center Ethernet switching in a single year is one of the most significant vendor landscape shifts IDC has tracked in enterprise networking,” said Paul Nicholson, research VP for cloud and data center networks at IDC. “Spectrum-X’s integrated GPU-plus-networking design is winning AI factory deals that incumbent networking vendors cannot match with standalone hardware alone.”

Nvidia’s networking rise comes as the firm looks beyond solely semiconductors, instead making a full-stack platform play. Interconnects have quickly become a key growth driver, with demand for Ethernet networking lines now “roughly on par” with its traditional InfiniBand base.

Data center networking as a whole contributed $14.8 billion for its Q1 fiscal 2027 earnings, growing 199% and affirming Jensen Huang’s bold GTC claim that Nvidia was now “the largest networking company in the world.”

IDC’s report billed Nvidia’s Spectrum-X platform as “the preferred network interconnect for large-scale AI training,” though it won’t have it easy at the top, with the analyst firm predicting incumbent vendors, including Cisco, Broadcom, and Arista Networks, are set to take on the market newcomer.

In total, the data center portion of the Ethernet switch market grew 61.0% YoY to reach $10 billion, while the continued AI buildout is being buoyed by spending on high-speed port lines – with 800 Gb/s (800G) switches alone accounting for 35.8% of data center segment revenues. Campus and branch switching, meanwhile, grew 12.3% YoY, supported by a hardware refresh cycle and rising component prices.

While Nvidia has the top revenue share in the DC (data center) segment, it’s Cisco that holds the largest market share for Ethernet switches, with 29.3%. IDC found Cisco’s total Ethernet switch revenues rose by 24.0% YoY in Q126, though the majority of its deals were in non-data center markets, which accounted for 60.5% of Cisco’s total. Strong campus refresh sales helped the networking giant draw in revenue growth from its traditional base, though its data center revenues rose 43.0% YoY.

Behind Nvidia for total market share was Arista, which saw revenues grow 37.3% YoY in Q126 to $2.2 billion. Notably, 92% of its Ethernet switch revenues were in the data center space, with Arista holding a 20.7% share of the segment.

Rounding out the top five vendors for the total Ethernet switch market were Huawei and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The Chinese vendor jumped 27.2% YoY to revenues of $895 million, while HPE saw a 15.4% YoY rise amid infused revenues from its Juniper acquisition.

“Enterprise campus and branch Ethernet switching growth is driven by a variety of factors: First, organizations are upgrading both their wired and wireless networks as part of a multi-year refresh cycle to support Wi-Fi 7, and enhanced speeds across the access, distribution, and core layers of the network,” said Brandon Butler, senior research manager for network infrastructure and services at IDC. “AI, security, and IoT are other key drivers. Meanwhile, memory-driven supply chain concerns are a headwind worth watching in the coming quarters.”

IDC’s findings come as Ethernet continues to dominate AI-centric back-end networks.

Findings from Dell’Oro Group suggest that around two-thirds of Q1 data center switch sales were Ethernet, with the engineering familiarity and the integration of lossless technology once reserved for InfiniBand helping to drive that demand. Prior Dell’Oro Group research said Ethernet would dominate the data center-scale fabric space, projecting the protocol to drive around $80 billion in switch sales over the next five years.

Ethernet’s rise doesn’t discount InfiniBand, with the analyst firm stating related switch sales more than tripled during the quarter, owing to the ramp of switches being shipped as part of Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra platform.

Co-packaged optics iterations of Nvidia switches spanning both protocols are set to drop later this year. The semiconductor giant is promoting the technology as a way to significantly lower power consumption by removing the requirement for conventional pluggable modules. The industry got an initial glimpse at the first InfiniBand-centric CPO switch, the Quantum-X Q3450-LD, courtesy of Microsoft-backed neocloud Lambda.