When analyst benchmarks miss the mark: Why Nvidia doesn’t fit Forrester’s data center matrix

In the context of data center switching, the products are specialized, high-throughput AI fabrics designed to prevent multi-billion-dollar GPU clusters from sitting idle while waiting on network I/O. The results speak for themselves. At a run rate of more than $11 billion, Nvidia sells more data center networking equipment than most vendors on the Wave combined, because that’s the high-growth segment of the industry. Trying to build a product to address the general-purpose part of the market would be a waste of time and money for Nvidia. 

For the Wave, evaluating an AI factory fabric using a legacy enterprise networking matrix produces misleading results.

Flawed weighting in an AI-driven era

The mismatch becomes even clearer when examining the underlying questionnaire weightings. In a technical evaluation with dozens of criteria, Forrester allocated just 2% of the overall weight to AI infrastructure support, which seems light-years from market reality. Today, every enterprise board, CIO, and data center architect is restructuring infrastructure strategies around AI, yet Forrester assigned AI networking capabilities a 2% weighting.