Nvidia quietly rose to the top of a $10 billion market you may have never heard of

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

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Nvidia's dominance in AI is moving beyond chips.For the first time, the company became the top vendor by revenue in data center Ethernet switches — the networking gear that helps connect AI chips inside data centers, according to market research firm IDC.This market is growing fast because cloud giants and other large businesses are pouring hundreds of billions into building out AI data centers. IDC research vice president Paul Nicholson called Nvidia's ascension "one of the most significant vendor landscape shifts IDC has tracked in enterprise networking."In the first quarter of 2026, Nvidia generated $2.1 billion in data center Ethernet switch revenue — a 21.5% share of the market. That's up from 4% in the first quarter of 2024, said IDC senior research manager Brandon Butler.Nvidia has pushed ahead of rivals like Arista Networks, which held a 20.7% share of the data center Ethernet switch market in the first quarter of this year. Other major players include Cisco, Huawei, and HPE.The data center Ethernet switch market totaled $10 billion in the first quarter, according to IDC, growing 61% from a year earlier.IDC attributed Nvidia's growth in networking revenue to its Spectrum-X product, "a tightly integrated system" that's designed to work closely with its AI chips, Butler said.