CScale launches with $188M in backing for cross-rack AI links

CScale launched on Sept. 30 with $188 million in backing to commercialize an optical interconnect for companies assembling large artificial-intelligence clusters. SiliconANGLE reported that about three-quarters of the capital came through a recently closed Series C. The hardware is designed to link the specialized accelerators inside data centers.

Today, a scale-up domain is typically one rack whose chips function like a single computer. Adding capacity means adding more domains, but data moves more slowly between domains than it does among accelerators inside one. CScale is attacking that cross-rack bottleneck rather than designing another accelerator.

The company says its interconnect can link thousands of accelerators across dozens of racks and move their data over optical links, which are faster than copper wiring. The goal is a larger scale-up cluster in which more chips can coordinate without the same inter-domain slowdown.

But faster links introduce their own operational problem. One optical-link failure can disturb other components in a tightly coupled cluster. CScale says its design can contain those failures and improve uptime, but SiliconANGLE noted that the company hasn’t explained how it delivers that reliability.

SiliconANGLE also cited a job posting indicating that CScale plans to ship the technology as a system-on-chip with an onboard central processor. The company called the product an “integrated light engine,” and the report said the processor may run network-automation software. The report did not identify a shipping date or any customers.

CScale was founded in 2023 by Chief Technology Officer Sanjai Kohli, who previously founded GPS-chip supplier SiRF Technologies. Chief Executive Officer Martin Lund previously led Cisco’s chip-engineering group and Broadcom’s switch business. The company plans to use the funding to develop the technology and accelerate commercialization.