Gelsinger-Backed Startup Challenges Nvidia's AI Networking Moat with $100 Million

Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel, is backing a startup called Delos Data that aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI networking. On September 15, Delos Data announced it had raised over $100 million to develop networking chips and software for heterogeneous AI data centers. This funding round was joined by Playground Global, where Gelsinger is a general partner.

Nvidia's strength lies not just in its fast GPUs but also in its tightly integrated system of accelerators, networking, interconnects, and software. This makes large clusters easier to deploy and gives customers fewer reasons to mix architectures. Delos Data is betting that the market will become less uniform as inference expands, and its pitch is that a data center should be able to connect whatever mix of accelerators makes economic sense.

Delos' architecture works by making the network work across different types of compute hardware, rather than assuming every accelerator comes from Nvidia. This could benefit AMD indirectly, as it improves Instinct accelerator performance and wins AI deployments. However, Delos still has to prove its claimed performance improvements in commercial deployments.