Cornelis raises $205M to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in AI networking

Cornelis Networks just pulled in $205 million to scale its high-performance networking hardware, positioning itself as a credible alternative to the proprietary interconnect systems that dominate AI data centers today. The round, led by IAG Capital Partners, will fund production of the company’s CN5000 and CN6000 switches and push the company deeper into the scale-up networking market.

What Cornelis actually builds

The company’s newly launched Active Compute Fabric architecture combines programmable compute capabilities with lossless data transport and in-fabric acceleration, offloading some processing tasks to the network itself rather than making the AI chips handle everything. The goal is to reduce congestion in large AI clusters and improve how efficiently those clusters use their accelerators.

The CN5000 switch is already shipping with 400 Gbps throughput. The CN6000, which supports multiple protocols at 800 Gbps, is expected to become more broadly available in Q4 2026.

The open-standards bet

Cornelis’s approach leans heavily on open, standards-based networking. The company supports technologies like Ultra Ethernet and UALink, both of which are backed by industry consortiums seeking alternatives to Nvidia’s proprietary interconnect stack.

The timing of a strategic partnership with Qualcomm Technologies reinforces this positioning. The two companies plan to showcase the collaboration at the AI Infra Summit.

From national labs to data centers

Cornelis traces its lineage to Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture, a high-performance networking technology that Intel developed for supercomputing workloads before spinning it out in 2020. Since then, Cornelis has pivoted from that HPC heritage toward the AI networking market.

The Lynx supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory runs on Cornelis networking, and the company has additional implementations across government and academic institutions.

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