Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold upgraded Arista Networks to Outperform from Market Perform with a $164 price target. The company's sales growth will improve in 2027 and beyond as it expands into new applications like scale-across and gains share in the AI backend and campus, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The firm says "thematic AI growth vectors" are emerging that play to Arista's strengths, namely inference and reasoning workloads. Larger, more distributed AI clusters are "increasing the volume, burstiness, and unpredictability of east west traffic," contends Raymond James. It believes this raises the value of network intelligence from Arista.
