AI infrastructure company Cornelis raises $205M to chip away at Nvidia s dominance. The company also announced a product called Active Compute Fabric, a network technology that targets the fact that much GPU time is wasted waiting for Cornelis, a company creating 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. It also announced a product called Active Compute Fabric, a network technology that targets the fact that much GPU time is wasted waiting for data to arrive. Cornelis hopes to address this with a networking fabric that lets chips process and send information at the same time. The company, which spun off from Intel in 2020, is competing with Nvidia by offering an open architecture, meaning customers can use a variety of GPU and accelerator hardware with Cornelis' networking fabric. Though Nvidia chips can technically run on other networking fabrics, they're optimized to run on Nvidia's own software, making it much easier - and more enticing - for customers to use Nvidia's full GPU stack. Cornelis is part of a new wave of AI infrastructure companies emerging to break apart Nvidia's market dominance, piece by piece (or chip by chip, one could say). Cornelis has already started shipping its product and is working on a new generation of it, expected to be released later this year.

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...