Cornelis secures $205 million to launch networking fabric challenging Nvidia

Cornelis, an AI infrastructure firm that originated from Intel in 2020, disclosed a $205 million funding round led by IAG Capital Partners. Alongside the financing, the company launched its Active Compute Fabric, a networking technology aimed at eliminating the latency that forces GPUs to wait for data. By enabling chips to compute and communicate concurrently, the fabric seeks to boost overall AI workload efficiency.

Unlike Nvidia’s tightly integrated software stack, Cornelis promotes an open architecture that can work with a range of GPU and accelerator hardware. Although Nvidia GPUs can operate on alternative fabrics, they are optimized for Nvidia’s own solution, making Cornelis’s approach attractive to customers seeking flexibility. The firm has already started delivering the product and is developing a second generation slated for release later this year.