Cornelis raises $205M to challenge Nvidia's AI networking dominance
Cornelis, an Intel spin-off, raised $205 million led by IAG Capital Partners and unveiled Active Compute Fabric, aiming to reduce GPU idle time and challenge Nvidia's dominance.
Active Compute Fabric is a network technology aimed at a common problem in AI computing: much GPU time is wasted waiting for data to arrive. Cornelis hopes to address this with a networking fabric that lets chips process and send information at the same time. The company has already started shipping the product and is working on a new generation that is expected to be released later this year.
Cornelis, which spun off from Intel in 2020, is competing with Nvidia by offering an open architecture. That means customers can use a variety of GPU and accelerator hardware with Cornelis' networking fabric. Nvidia chips can technically run on other networking fabrics, but they are optimized to run on Nvidia's own software, making it easier and more enticing for customers to use Nvidia's full GPU stack.
TechCrunch reported that Cornelis is part of a new wave of AI infrastructure companies emerging to break apart Nvidia's market dominance piece by piece. The company is now selling its networking technology while developing its next generation.