Cornelis Raises $205 Million To Offer Data Centers A New Path Away From Nvidia

Cornelis said Monday it secured about $205 million in new financing led by IAG Capital Partners and rolled out a product called Active Compute Fabric that it says will cut the time GPUs spend idling while waiting for data. The company pitched the technology to cloud and enterprise purchasers as a way to get more out of mixed hardware deployments.

The startup, spun out of Intel in 2020, designs an interconnect that tries to overlap data movement with computation so processors don’t have to pause while transfers complete. Company engineers argue the approach can boost utilization in clusters where memory and network delays often leave accelerators underused.

Cornelis is positioning its stack as hardware-agnostic, allowing customers to pair different GPUs and specialty accelerators under one communication layer. That contrasts with Nvidia’s tightly integrated software and networking choices, which many customers find more straightforward to deploy even when other interconnects are technically compatible.

An industry consultant who reviews data center kit said the product could influence buying decisions if it delivers steady gains for operators: “If you can reclaim a slice of otherwise lost compute time, it changes the math on hardware refreshes,” they said. Cornelis has begun shipping its initial system and plans a new model later this year.