For three years, the AI race has been a race for faster chips. Eliyan just became a $1bn company by pointing out that the chips are now too fast for their own wires.
The Santa Clara startup said it closed an oversubscribed $145m Series C at a $1bn valuation, making it a unicorn, the company announced. Seligman Ventures led the round. Two strategic investors joined, Cisco Investments and Lumentum.
The bottleneck moved
Modern AI accelerators can crunch numbers far faster than they can be fed. So they sit idle, waiting for data. Eliyan’s chief executive Ramin Farjadrad put a number on it to Reuters: “Today we are at the point that we are maybe 30-40% of the GPUs is being used, and is being mainly limited by how fast they can receive the data to process. We’re solving that problem.”
Eliyan sells the plumbing, not the compute. Its NuLink links and NuGear chiplets shuttle data between chips, between packages, and across racks. The pitch is simple. Faster, lower-power connections let a data centre’s expensive silicon run closer to full tilt.
