Cornelis raises $205M to challenge Nvidia's networking lock-in

Cornelis, a company building networking technology to help AI chips communicate more effectively, announced Monday that it has raised $205 million in a funding round led by IAG Capital Partners. The company also announced a new product called Active Compute Fabric, a networking technology aimed at a specific inefficiency: GPU time wasted while chips wait for data to arrive. Cornelis says its fabric lets chips process and send information simultaneously, addressing that bottleneck.

Cornelis, which spun off from Intel in 2020, is positioning itself against Nvidia by offering an open architecture that lets customers pair a variety of GPU and accelerator hardware with its networking fabric. Nvidia chips can technically run on other networking fabrics, but they’re optimized for Nvidia’s own software, which makes it easier — and more appealing — for customers to stay within Nvidia’s full GPU stack. Cornelis is part of a new wave of AI infrastructure companies trying to chip away at that dominance piece by piece.

The company has already started shipping its current product and is working on a new generation of it, expected to be released later this year.

Why it matters

Cornelis’s bet is that enterprises building AI infrastructure will pay a premium for hardware flexibility rather than lock-in to a single vendor’s stack — a wager that only pays off if enough buyers decide switching costs are worth avoiding.