Jayshree Ullal

Jayshree Ullal (born 1961) was born in London, raised in New Delhi, and trained as an electrical engineer in San Francisco. After senior roles at AMD and fifteen years at Cisco — where she ran a multibillion-dollar enterprise switching business — she became CEO of the startup Arista Networks in 2008, took it public in 2014, and built it into the dominant supplier of high-speed switches to cloud giants. Her Arista stake has made her one of America’s wealthiest self-made women.

Selling the plumbing of the AI buildout

When training clusters exploded in size, the network connecting tens of thousands of GPUs became as strategic as the chips themselves. Ullal positioned Arista squarely in that fight, championing open Ethernet against Nvidia’s proprietary InfiniBand. In late 2024 she told analysts Arista’s big cloud customers were “pivoting very aggressively to AI,” with three of them expected to scale to clusters of 50,000 to 200,000 GPUs in 2025 — a year she called the year of AI production.

The bet paid off. Announcing full-year 2025 results in February 2026, she reported that Arista had shipped a cumulative 150 million ports and blown through its AI networking targets, with Ethernet revenues overtaking InfiniBand in AI back-end networks across the industry. Proprietary, single-vendor lock-in stacks, she declared, are in the rearview mirror.

Ullal rarely philosophizes about AI’s social impact; her advocacy is a builder’s. Arista’s fortunes are now tied directly to the scale of the AI infrastructure boom, making her one of its most financially committed believers.