AI networking startup Upscale scores $200M to challenge Nvidia's NVSwitch

AI networking startup Upscale AI on Wednesday announced it has raised $200 million in Series A funding to challenge Nvidia's dominance of switches for rack-scale AI systems, putting it in competition with the likes of Cisco and AMD.

Founded last year, with backing from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, Upscale is developing a new class of scale-up network switches specifically designed to compete with the NVSwitch chips found in Nvidia's NVL72 racks.

NVLink is a high-speed interconnect technology that Nvidia developed to abstract memory and compute resources from multiple GPUs so they appear as a single logical resource.

The tech debuted in 2024, and ever since, the likes of AMD and Cisco have tried to create alternatives. But their efforts so far, like Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) and Ethernet for Scale-Up AI Infrastructure (ESUN) remain immature.

The first UALink-based rack systems from AMD will hit the ...