Cornelis Networks, a company spun off from Intel in 2020, has raised $205 million in a funding round led by IAG Capital Partners. The money will fund production of its CN5000 and CN6000 network switches and speed up deployment of a new architecture called Active Compute Fabric.
The pitch is simple: expensive GPUs sit idle while they wait for data to arrive over the network. Active Compute Fabric embeds RISC-V compute cores directly into the network fabric to accelerate tasks like KV-cache handling and mixture-of-experts routing, letting chips process and transmit data simultaneously. CEO Lisa Spelman said the approach can "drive that GPU utilization up five points, 10 points" without buying more hardware. The CN6000, Cornelis's second-generation switch, runs at 800 gigabits and supports both Ethernet and the company's own Omni-Path protocol, letting it pair with third-party switches from vendors like Broadcom.
Unlike Nvidia, which locks customers into its proprietary NVLink ecosystem, Cornelis is betting on open standards such as UALink and ESUN so buyers can mix GPUs and accelerators from different vendors. It's one of several infrastructure startups now chasing a slice of Nvidia's dominant position in AI data-center networking.