Industry

Nvidia’s networking division generated $31 billion in fiscal year 2026 revenue — $11 billion in Q4 alone — making a GPU company the largest data center Ethernet switch vendor on the planet. According to Nvidia’s Q4 FY2026 earnings report, networking revenue surged 267% year-over-year, and the division now generates more quarterly revenue than Cisco’s entire annual data center switching business. This isn’t a side project. Networking is now Nvidia’s second-largest business segment, and it’s reshaping who builds, sells, and operates data center networks. ...

HPE’s networking business just posted the most eye-catching quarter in enterprise networking history: $2.7 billion in revenue, up 152% year-over-year, with a 23.7% operating margin. The Juniper Networks acquisition — which closed in July 2025 for $14 billion — is paying off faster than even HPE’s bulls expected, and it’s reshaping the competitive landscape that every network engineer operates in. Key Takeaway: The HPE-Juniper merger has created the first full-stack alternative to Cisco across campus, data center, security, and routing — and the financial results prove the market is buying it. Network engineers who build multi-vendor skills now will be positioned for the next decade of enterprise networking. ...

Cisco calls itself an “AI infrastructure leader.” HPE-Juniper is “AI-native networking.” Arista powers “AI data centers.” At MWC 2026, every networking vendor pitched an AI story. But when you strip away the marketing decks, what’s actually changed in the protocols you configure, the architectures you design, and the career bets you should make? Key Takeaway: The AI pivot is real at the revenue level — $630B+ in hyperscaler capex is flowing through networking vendors — but the skills that matter are protocol-level (VXLAN EVPN, BGP, RDMA/RoCE, 800G Ethernet), not vendor-specific AI branding. CCIE fundamentals aren’t going away; they’re becoming more valuable. ...