Arista Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ANET) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Pierre Ferragu: Great. Thanks for your answers.

Jayshree Ullal: Thanks, Pierre.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Michael Genovese with Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Michael Genovese: Great. Thanks so much. I guess just sort of theoretically in an AI data center, I mean let’s just €“ current way of doing chat versus an AI chat, can you give us some sense of the switching intensity increase in the new use case with AI? Is there a multiplier to put on the switching or the networking to think about the higher amount of content and spend for AIs?

Anshul Sadana: Sure. Michael, I’ll take this one. It’s way hard to generalize. It must have a single number, but AI equals so much more. But I’ll give you an example of something that Andy talked about at the last Analyst Day. And if you look at the recent pattern, which Meta published some papers about some of the time, the GPOs were sitting idle because they were waiting for the to come back. So networking becomes the bottleneck and you can add more bandwidth then you essentially become non-blocking. You can do your job can run faster and you can use your GPUs in a much more efficient manner. So a rough order of magnitude with GPU clusters need about 3x more bandwidth than a traditional compute network today. But again, that’s a generalization, doesn’t apply to every use case. But if you need a single number, that’s the one I would use.

Michael Genovese: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Meta Marshall: Great. Thanks. I just wanted to get a sense of €“ on supply chain, what you’re seeing there in terms of did it loosen faster than you were expecting in Q4 and that was part of the upside or just how you’re looking at conditions kind of improving throughout the year and maybe just that kind of release to gross margins as we think about throughout the year and kind of the overhead of the inventory currently. Thanks.

Jayshree Ullal: Thanks, Meta. I’ll comment on it and Anshul, you don’t have a few words, too. Look, supply chain hasn’t eased up enough for us. Maybe we have more demand than others, and that’s why we’re feeling it more. But having said that, our Q4 numbers would have been even better if supply chain had eased. And our Q1 gross margin is a reflection that supply chain is still an overhead on our cost, right? We expect Q1 to be the absolute worst. We’re going to improve thereafter every other quarter. So supply chain is going to be using in the back half of €˜23. And as you know, at the Analyst Day, we gave a guide of €“ Ita, we said 61 to 63 for the year?

Ita Brennan: Yes.

Jayshree Ullal: So we fully intend to improve our gross margins every quarter thereafter after, potentially hitting a low in Q1, which is an indication of supply chain improving. But at the same time, remember, another huge factor in our contribution to gross margins is the healthy cloud titan mix. We’d like to keep it healthy and ease supply chain, and that will give us some improvements.

Meta Marshall: Great. Thanks.

Jayshree Ullal: Thanks, Meta.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Alex Henderson with Needham. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

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