Spain's iPronics raises $125 million from Nvidia, others for data center networking chips

Valencia, Spain-based startup iPronics ​said Tuesday that it has raised $125 ​million in venture capital with participation ‌from Nvidia ​to shrink a new type of data center networking chip that could connect hundreds of thousands of computing chips.

iPronics is developing ‌what is called an optical circuit switch, a type of switching chip made popular in data centers by Alphabet's Google for its role in wiring up its AI supercomputers. Google's success with the ‌switches has inspired a wave of startups to bring them to the outside world. The ‌key benefit of the OCS is the ability to quickly adjust to a new path around a computing chip that has burned out, something that has become inevitable as data centers house hundreds of thousands of chips.

"The failures ⁠are ​happening on a 'minute' time ⁠scale — it's not in the hours or months or weeks any more," Daniel Pérez-López, founder and chief technical officer ⁠of iPronics, told Reuters in an interview. "The first motivation is to have resilience — a resilient and reliable network ​that is able to basically rewire itself." iPronics is hoping to keep that technological benefit ⁠while shrinking the size of the OCS equipment by about 20-fold from current sizes in order to fit more ⁠switches ​in a server rack. The company has been shipping its switches for about a year and said it is working with large AI infrastructure providers that it declined to name.

The ⁠funding round was by co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from new ⁠and existing investors including ⁠Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital and the European Innovation Council Fund. iPronics, founded in 2019 as a spin-off from Technical University of Valencia, has ‌raised $177 million ‌to date.