Veteran analyst upgrades Arista stock price on AI demand surge

Wall Street rarely changes its mind twice on the same stock within three weeks. With Arista Networks (ANET), it just did.

On May 15, a bullish call flipped Arista from a stock investors had been quietly trimming over customer concentration fears into one of the cleaner AI infrastructure plays heading into 2027.

Yet ANET shares actually fell 3.65% on the day the upgrade was announced, closing at roughly $136.43, according to ChartMill data. That gap, between what the analyst is saying and what the stock price is doing, is the real story.

Here is what changed, who said it, and why the dip may matter more than the upgrade.

Raymond James flips Arista to Outperform on broadening AI demand

The bullish call came from Simon Leopold at Raymond James, who upgraded Arista from Market Perform to Outperform with a $164 price target on May 15, 2026.

Leopold's thesis rests on three pillars: AI back-end market share gains, an emerging "scale-across" opportunity, and the prediction that Oracle (ORCL) will become Arista's next 10%-plus customer.

Scale-across, in plain terms, is the networking layer that lets AI training clusters extend across multiple data centers over a Wide Area Network. It is what makes a single training run feel local even when the GPUs are in different cities.

Leopold puts that opportunity at roughly $1 billion in current Arista AI sales, and sees it doubling to $2 billion by 2027.

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Roughly 40% of Arista's sales now come from AI applications, with cloud customers contributing another 40%, according to Raymond James. Meta and Microsoft together still represent more than 40% of total revenue.

That is the concentration problem Wall Street has worried about for two years.

Why two upgrades in two weeks signal a shift in Arista's narrative

This is the second major firm to re-up Arista in a short window. On May 1, Morgan Stanley analyst Meta Marshall raised her price target to $180 from $165 while keeping an Overweight rating, citing the same broadening AI customer base.

Two weeks. Two different firms. Same conclusion.

What changed is the buy-side framing. The story moved from "ANET depends too much on Meta and Microsoft" to "ANET is the picks-and-shovels play on the next AI capex wave."

If Oracle and Google materialize as 10%-plus customers, the concentration discount Wall Street has been applying to the stock starts to look stale.