In a strong stride toward advancing artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, Enfabrica Corporation announced at Supercomputing 2024 (SC24) the closing of a formidable $115 million Series C funding round, alongside the upcoming launch of its industry-first, 3.2 Terabit per second (Tbps) Accelerated Compute Fabric (ACF) SuperNIC chip. This groundbreaking announcement highlights Enfabrica’s growing influence within the AI and high-performance computing (HPC) sectors, marking it as a number one innovator in scalable AI networking solutions.
The oversubscribed Series C financing was led by Spark Capital, with contributions from recent investors Maverick Silicon and VentureTech Alliance. Existing investors, including Atreides Management, Alumni Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Valor Equity Partners, also took part within the round, underscoring widespread confidence in Enfabrica’s vision and products. This latest capital injection follows Enfabrica’s Series B funding of $125 million in September 2023, highlighting the rapid growth and sustained investor interest in the corporate.
said Rochan Sankar, CEO of Enfabrica.
The funding will probably be allocated to support the amount production ramp of Enfabrica’s ACF SuperNIC chip, expand the corporate’s global R&D team, and further develop Enfabrica’s product line, with the goal of remodeling AI data centers worldwide. This funding provides the means to speed up product and team growth at a pivotal moment in AI networking, as demand for scalable, high-bandwidth networking solutions in AI and HPC markets is rising steeply.
What Is a GPU and Why Is Networking Vital?
A GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is a specialized electronic circuit designed to hurry up the processing of images, video, and complicated computations. Unlike traditional Central Processing Units (CPUs) that handle sequential processing tasks, GPUs are built for parallel processing, making them highly effective in training AI models, performing scientific computations, and processing high-volume datasets. These properties make GPUs a fundamental tool in AI, enabling the training of large-scale models that power technologies equivalent to natural language processing, computer vision, and other GenAI applications.
In data centers, GPUs are deployed in vast arrays to handle massive computational workloads. Nonetheless, for AI clusters to perform at scale, these GPUs require a sturdy, high-bandwidth networking solution to make sure efficient data transfer between one another and with other components. Enfabrica’s ACF SuperNIC chip addresses this challenge by providing unprecedented connectivity, enabling seamless integration and communication across large GPU clusters.
Breakthrough Capabilities of Enfabrica’s ACF SuperNIC
The newly introduced ACF SuperNIC offers groundbreaking performance with a throughput of three.2 Tbps, delivering multi-port 800-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. This connectivity provides 4 times the bandwidth and multipath resiliency of every other GPU-attached network interface controller (NIC) available on the market, establishing Enfabrica as a frontrunner in advanced AI networking. The SuperNIC enables a high-radix, high-bandwidth network design that supports PCIe/Ethernet multipathing and data mover capabilities, allowing data centers to scale as much as 500,000 GPUs while maintaining low latency and high performance.
The ACF SuperNIC is the primary of its kind to introduce a “software-defined networking” approach to AI networking, giving data center operators full-stack control and programmability over their network infrastructure. This ability to customize and fine-tune network performance is important for managing large AI clusters, which require highly efficient data movement to avoid bottlenecks and maximize computational efficiency.
said Sankar.
Unique Features Driving the ACF SuperNIC
Enfabrica’s ACF SuperNIC chip incorporates several pioneering features designed to satisfy the unique demands of AI data centers. Key features include:
- High-Bandwidth Connectivity: Supports 800, 400, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, with as much as 32 network ports and 160 PCIe lanes. This connectivity enables efficient and low-latency communication across an unlimited array of GPUs, crucial for large-scale AI applications.
- Resilient Message Multipathing (RMM): Enfabrica’s RMM technology eliminates network interruptions and AI job stalls by rerouting data in case of network failures, enhancing resiliency, and ensuring higher GPU utilization rates. This feature is very critical in maintaining uptime and serviceability in AI data centers where continuous operation is important.
- Software Defined RDMA Networking: By implementing Distant Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking, the ACF SuperNIC offers direct memory transfers between devices without CPU intervention, significantly reducing latency. This feature enhances the performance of AI applications that require rapid data access across GPUs.
- Collective Memory Zoning: This technology optimizes data movement and memory management across CPU, GPU, and CXL 2.0-based endpoints attached to the ACF-S chip. The result’s more efficient memory utilization and better Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPs) for GPU server clusters, boosting overall AI cluster performance.
The ACF SuperNIC’s hardware and software capabilities enable high-throughput, low-latency connectivity across GPUs, CPUs, and other components, setting a brand new benchmark in AI infrastructure.
Availability and Future Impact
Enfabrica’s ACF SuperNIC will probably be available in initial quantities in Q1 of 2025, with full-scale industrial availability anticipated through its partnerships with OEM and ODM systems in 2025. This launch, backed by substantial investor confidence and capital, places Enfabrica on the forefront of next-generation AI data center networking, an area of technology critical for supporting the exponential growth of AI applications globally.
With these advancements, Enfabrica is ready to redefine the landscape of AI infrastructure, providing AI clusters with unmatched efficiency, resiliency, and scalability. By combining cutting-edge hardware with software-defined networking, the ACF SuperNIC paves the best way for unprecedented growth in AI data centers, offering an answer tailored to satisfy the demands of the world’s most intensive computing applications.
