Anshul Sadana on AI infrastructure
From Zero to $5B+ Sales: Anshul Sadana’s Arista Journey · · ByteintoFuture
“There's a huge power challenge in AI: some GPUs today take between 1.5 to 2.5 kW and future GPUs may be 3 kW each — a 64,000‑GPU cluster at those numbers essentially maxes out the largest data center and is on the order of 100 megawatts or more; making that more efficient is a huge saving and important for global warming.”
On , Anshul Sadana, Former Chief Operating Officer at Arista Networks Inc, spoke about AI infrastructure during Zero to $5B+ Sales: Anshul Sadana’s Arista Journey on ByteintoFuture.
About Anshul Sadana
In a June 2024 interview, Anshul Sadana, former Chief Operating Officer at Arista Networks, discussed his 17-year tenure at the company. He described early goals of reaching $100 million and then $1 billion in revenue, and noted that after its IPO the company's valuation reached $3 billion. Sadana recalled that initial customers were from financial trading groups during the era of high-frequency trading, and that in 2008 the most requested feature was a sticker to hide Arista's logo so competitors would not know which product they were using. He stated that Arista won a contract to power Microsoft Azure in 2012, beating Cisco and others for a 40-gigabit opportunity. Sadana also discussed the company's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying Arista increased inventory tenfold and bought components for multiple years, a move he described as risky but necessary to meet customer demand during the supply-chain crisis. Sadana addressed several industry topics in the interview. He cited a Meta paper indicating that GPUs in their clusters were idle about 33% of the time waiting for network I/O. He commented on the power challenges in AI, noting that some GPUs consume between 1.5 and 2.5 kilowatts and that a 64,000-GPU cluster could require over 100 megawatts. He argued that at large scale, InfiniBand introduces single points of failure and that IP and Ethernet, enhanced through consortia like the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, provide a scalable solution. Sadana also reflected on a lawsuit with Cisco, saying that when a jury ruled in Arista's favor he was emotional because it proved the company had acted properly. He emphasized the importance of discipline in choosing which markets to serve and noted that total cost of ownership, including power consumption, can make Arista's designs more economical for cloud customers even if competitors give switches away for free.