Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley chip company developing networking chips for AI data centers, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $125 million in Series B venture funding round. Nvidia joined the round as a strategic investor. The startup was founded by leaders from Broadcom and Alphabet’s Google.
Enfabrica is a part of a larger trend of data centers being totally redesigned to produce generative AI technologies comparable to ChatGPT. The core of that change is a set of chips from Nvidia. The issue with Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU) processors is that they occasionally remain inactive because the networks that connect them cannot provide them with data at a high enough rate.
To address this issue, Enfabrica has created a network chip that seeks to connect the various components of a data center in novel ways. The Enfabrica chip builds a network that resembles a hub and spokes. This enables the Nvidia GPUs performing the data-crunching to draw data from numerous locations without encountering speed roadblocks.
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Rochan Sankar, co-founder and CEO of Enfabrica, claimed that this results in a considerably more effective use of GPUs, allowing for the completion of the same amount of computational work with just roughly half as many chips. Such an accomplishment is viewed favorably in the technology sector as these chips are more economical, he said.
Atreides Management served as the round’s lead investor. IAG Capital Partners, Valour Equity Partners, Infinitum Partners, Liberty Global Ventures, and Alumni Ventures were among the new investors added by Enfabrica. Sutter Hill Ventures, an earlier investor, also participated in the round.