Cornelis Networks has raised $205 million in funding led by IAG Capital Partners and launched its Active Compute Fabric architecture for AI workloads. The data center infrastructure startup also announced a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies. The Active Compute Fabric integrates programmable compute directly into the network, performing workload-specific operations as data moves through the system. This approach can reduce overall network traffic by up to 50%, according to pre-production simulations. The architecture addresses bottlenecks that leave AI accelerators idle whilst waiting for data. Built on open standards including Ethernet, UALink, and Ultra Ethernet, the fabric can adapt in real time, offload complex operations, and work with existing compute architectures. Cornelis will use the funding to scale production of its CN5000 and CN6000 network switches and accelerate Active Compute Fabric deployment.

Cornelis and NEC Expand Collaboration to Advance AI and HPC Infrastructure in Japan. August 20, 2026 Press play to listen to this content WAYNE, Pa. and TOKYO, Aug. 20, 2026 - Cornelis and NEC Corporation have announced an expanded collaboration that builds on the companies' successful work together in Europe and will help organizations across Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region deploy next-generation AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure using Cornelis high-performance networking solutions. The expanded collaboration builds on NEC's successful evaluation of the Cornelis CN5000 Omni-Path platform and the companies' existing collaboration in Europe, creating a foundation to support enterprise AI, manufacturing, research, and high-performance computing deployments across Japan. As part of the collaboration, NEC also plans to participate in early evaluation activities for the next-generation Cornelis CN6000 platform, helping customers prepare for increasingly complex AI and HPC workloads. "AI infrastructure is placing unprecedented demands on network performance, scalability, and efficiency," said Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis. "NEC's extensive experience delivering enterprise and HPC infrastructure throughout Japan makes them an outstanding partner as we continue giving customers more choice and bringing advanced networking technologies to new markets. Together, we're helping customers build AI and HPC environments that deliver greater performance today while preparing for the next generation of large-scale computing." The collaboration reflects growing adoption of open, high-performance networking alternatives as AI and HPC deployments continue to scale. Following a comprehensive technical evaluation of the CN5000 platform, NEC and Cornelis will continue collaborating to support customer opportunities by leveraging NEC's long-standing relationships with enterprise, manufacturing, academic, and research organizations throughout Japan. NEC's evaluation included extensive MPI communication testing across multiple workloads and communication patterns, validating the capabilities of the CN5000 platform while also identifying optimization techniques that further improve application performance. The joint evaluation demonstrated the value of close engineering collaboration to help customers maximize networking efficiency across large-scale HPC environments. The companies also plan to extend their collaboration to the upcoming Cornelis CN6000 platform, allowing NEC to evaluate next-generation networking technologies as customers prepare for larger AI training, inference, and HPC deployments. "Organizations across Japan are preparing for increasingly complex AI and HPC environments that require higher performance, scalability, and efficiency," said Takeshi Hirose, Senior Director of Compute Department, NEC Corporation. "Our collaboration with Cornelis broadens the high-performance networking technologies available to our customers while allowing us to evaluate next-generation capabilities that support future computing requirements." The collaboration further strengthens Cornelis' growing global ecosystem of infrastructure partners, enabling customers to deploy high-performance networking through trusted server and infrastructure providers while benefiting from continued innovation across the Cornelis product portfolio. As AI clusters continue to scale, Cornelis and NEC will continue working together to evaluate new networking technologies, optimize customer deployments, and support future AI and HPC infrastructure across Japan and beyond. About Cornelis Cornelis delivers high-performance, scale-out networking solutions that accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Built on the powerful Omni-Path architecture, Cornelis technology enables lossless, congestion-free networking that reduces training time, improves inference, and maximizes compute utilization. From foundation model training to complex climate modeling and real-time analytics, Cornelis' solutions power the most demanding workloads across commercial, academic, government and cloud environments. With a focus on performance, scalability, and efficiency, Cornelis helps organizations achieve faster insights and greater return on infrastructure investments. Learn more at cornelis.com. About NEC Corporation The NEC Group leverages technology to create social value and promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. NEC Corporation was established in 1899. Today, the NEC Group's approximately 110,000 employees utilize world-leading AI, security, and communications technologies to solve the most pressing needs of customers and society. For more information, please visit https://www.nec.com. Deep Origin this month announced that its AI drug discovery framework delivered nearly a 31%... AI models are getting better at a rapid pace. They are now able to reason,... The tech industry is fixated on one main metric, the raw number of GPUs accumulated... Scientists running large simulations can end up with terabytes of data that then has to... Jensen Huang believes NVIDIA's chips are becoming much more than expensive pieces of hardware. As... As hybrid cognition deepens, the boundary between biological and artificial embodiment will begin to blur...

Get more from your 400 Gb/s fabric: lessons from Lenovo's Cornelis CN5000 validation. July 29th, 2026 Paul Stasurak, Cornelis-Lenovo Solutions Key takeaways: * Get more value from a 400 Gb/s fabric investment: Lenovo measured 378-391 Gb/s across tested node pairs, averaging 385 Gb/s - nearly 100% of the nominal line rate. * Accelerate communication-intensive HPC and AI workloads: The validated configuration delivered node-to-node latency as low as approximately 1.1 μs on Lenovo ThinkSystem SC750 V4 servers powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors. * Reduce deployment risk and time spent tuning: Lenovo's LP2474 guide documents the tested firmware, Fabric Manager, cabling, and MPI settings, giving teams a validated starting point instead of a blank page Make every bit of your 400 Gb/s HPC network count. When you invest in a 400 Gb/s fabric, the gap between "installed" and "optimized" is measured in real money - idle CPU cores, longer job queues, and fewer HPC simulations completed per day. A fabric running at 70% of its potential quietly taxes every workload on the cluster. Getting deployment and tuning right the first time is what turns a capital purchase into sustained scientific output. This isn't theory. Lenovo's EveryScale team validated the full deployment in their HPC Benchmarking Centre on ThinkSystem SC750 V4 servers powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors - a real cluster, real cables, and real benchmarks. A fast network can still underperform. A high-performance interconnect is only as fast as its weakest configuration step. A firmware level that's slightly off, a cable on the wrong switch port, or an MPI stack left at defaults can silently cost 10-20% of your performance. And because the loss is invisible without careful benchmarking, most teams never know it's there. The last mile to an efficient HPC cluster. CN5000 is a complete 400 Gb/s end-to-end Omni-Path fabric with credit-based flow control, fine-grained adaptive routing, delivered on an end-to-end network of SuperNICs and Switches built for over 800 million messages per second. But raw capability has knobs. A dual-socket, 128-core node defaults to 208 MPI contexts - not enough to feed every core without context sharing. Cable length dictates which switch ports deliver latency-optimized links. The fabric manager needs the right port and adapter configuration to sweep the fabric cleanly. None of these are defects; they're the settings that decide whether you get spec-sheet performance or something less. From high-speed hardware to a tuned HPC system. Cornelis doesn't hand you hardware and walk away. Together with Lenovo, Cornelis Networks publish experience-based best-practice guides drawn from real deployments - pairing the open Cornelis OPX (Omni-Path Provider) software stack with documented, repeatable tuning. OPX is OpenFabrics-compliant and built on OFI/libfabric, so it runs Open MPI, MPICH, MVAPICH, and NCCL/RCCL with no application rewrites. The tunables that matter - MPI context sharing, bulk transfer service, and SDMA - are spelled out, not left to guesswork. Its goal is simple: help you squeeze every ounce of value from the network you already paid for, so your cluster is not held back by the network. What Lenovo measured on ThinkSystem servers. The proof, straight from the Lenovo benchmarking center: * Bandwidth: 378-391 Gb/s measured across all node pairs (averaging 385 Gb/s) - roughly 96% of the 400 Gb/s line rate. * Latency: as low as ~1.1 microseconds node-to-node, delivering one of the industry's lowest end-to-end latency for cluster networking * Repeatability: every firmware level, command, and tunable is documented against Lenovo's tested "best recipe." The advantages of CN5000 expand beyond what Lenovo specifically tested. CN5000 SuperNICs are engineered for 800M+ messages per second - the currency of MPI collectives and AI communication and the OPX stack (OFI/libfabric) run today's MPI and AI libraries with no application rewrites. Evaluate the deployment, not the spec sheet. When you evaluate an HPC fabric, look past the peak numbers on the spec sheet and ask what happens after the purchase order. Does the vendor publish validated reference architectures and tested firmware "best recipes"? Is the software stack open and compatible with your existing MPI and AI libraries? And are the performance tunables documented and matched to your CPU SKU - since core count, sockets, and cabling all change the right settings? The answers determine how much of that 400 Gb/s you'll actually use. How to get started. Leverage the full guide, written by networking experts. Lenovo's "Installation and Best Practices for Implementing Cornelis CN5000 Omni-Path on Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers" (Lenovo Press, LP2474) walks through the entire deployment step by step. Then talk to the Cornelis team about bringing the same confidence to your own cluster.