AI networking provider Upscale AI raises $190M at $2B valuation
Data center networking startup Upscale AI Inc. today announced that it has raised $190 million in fresh funding.
The capital was provided as an extension to a $200 million Series A round that the company first closed in January. The new raise was led by Premji Invest with participation from Nvidia Corp., Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures, Temasek and several existing backers. Upscale AI is now valued at $2 billion.
A data center includes several types of switches that are each designed for different tasks. There are scale-up switches optimized to move data between servers installed in the same rack. Traffic between racks, in turn, is managed by so-called scale-out devices. Upscale AI is developing scale-up and scale-out switches optimized for artificial intelligence workloads.
The calculations that an AI model uses to process a prompt must be carried out one after one another. If an unexpected latency spike delays one of the calculations, all the subsequent computations have to be postponed. Such inefficiencies can emerge when graphics processing units exchange data slower than expected while running an AI model.
