Enfabrica secures USD $115m for world's fastest SuperNIC

Enfabrica, a semiconductor startup, has announced a USD $115 million Series C financing round and the upcoming availability of its ACF SuperNIC, described as the world's fastest solution for GPU networking.

The Series C funding round was oversubscribed and led by Spark Capital. New investors such as Arm, Cisco Investments, Maverick Silicon, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and VentureTech Alliance have also contributed. Enfabrica plans to use this funding to commence volume production of its ACF SuperNIC chips, enhance its global research and development team, and expand its product line development further.

Enfabrica's Accelerated Compute Fabric (ACF) SuperNIC is set to be available for initial distribution in the first quarter of 2025. The ACF-S chip boasts a data transfer capability of 3.2 Terabits per second, high-bandwidth, and concurrent PCIe/Ethernet multipathing. It is designed to scale up and out four to eight of the latest-generation GPUs per server system, offering significant improvements in AI cluster performance, scalability, and resiliency.

As modern cloud infrastructure evolves to meet AI-driven demands, Enfabrica asserts that its ACF-S technology redefines conventional GPU networking designs by addressing existing performance gaps in data centers.

Enfabrica highlights that this technology provides a new approach to optimising AI architectures.

Further commendations came from industry leaders. Pradeep Vincent, Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Architect at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, remarked, "Oracle Cloud recognizes the high value of the networking ecosystem as part of our investment in building out GPU clouds for the world's most advanced AI workloads. Our roadmap for AI compute infrastructure is heterogeneous and we are proud to offer industry leading performance with better reliability and cost/power efficiency."

"We support ecosystem partners in innovating with technology and solutions for our customers. We applaud Enfabrica's advancement of a unique, high-radix SuperNIC chip architecture that hits the right chords on performance, resiliency, multi-accelerator support, and efficiency of resource utilization. We look forward to seeing ACF-S silicon in action."

Mohamed Awad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure Business at Arm, commented on the critical role of scalable networking in data centres.

"Scalable networking is critical to data centres deploying the accelerated computing required by demanding AI workloads. By harnessing the flexibility of the Arm Neoverse platform, Enfabrica's networking solution is already delivering new levels of performance and efficiency, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration to build an advanced infrastructure for the AI era."

Marco Chisari, Executive Vice-President and Head of Samsung Strategy & Innovation Center at Samsung Electronics, added, "Samsung strongly believes interconnect technology is critical to the scaling of AI compute, and we are investing in AI silicon technologies across the spectrum to achieve truly scalable and efficient system level solutions."

"We are excited to see what Enfabrica's ACF-S solution can deliver to the next wave of AI compute and storage systems to address performance, resiliency and scaling efficiency."