data-center-networking
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The $50 Million Network Rebel That Lets 600 Operators Shop for Their Own Hardware
IP Infusion sells the software inside carrier-grade routers while letting customers pick the box. That separation has turned hardware shortages, power bills and vendor lock-in into a surprisingly practical sales pitch.
Chelsio Bet the CPU Was the Bottleneck - Now Its 400Gb Cards Want Into the AI Rack
For two decades, Chelsio has sold a stubbornly practical idea: the network card should do more of the networking. Its seventh-generation platform now carries that bet into 400Gb Ethernet, GPU clusters and a market crowded with much larger chip companies.
The Tiny Box Carrying AI's Biggest Traffic Jam
InnoLight makes the pack-of-gum-sized optical modules that let AI clusters talk at 800 gigabits and beyond. Its real product is not light alone, but a practical escape route from bandwidth, heat and power constraints.
Arrcus, Inc.
Arrcus wants the network to stop arriving as a sealed appliance. Its software runs across white-box switches, clouds and edge sites - and now the company is betting that AI will make that freedom more valuable.
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks is a Nasdaq-listed enterprise networking company that designs wired and wireless infrastructure - switches, Wi-Fi access points and SD-WAN - and pairs it with cloud-managed, AI-driven software. Built around ExtremeCloud IQ and the newer Extreme Platform ONE, the company delivers cloud and increasingly AI-native networking to more than 50,000 customers worldwide, from NFL stadiums and hospitals to schools, factories and retailers. Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, it competes with Cisco, HPE Aruba, Juniper and Arista by pitching a single, simpler platform that unifies networking, security and analytics.
Aviz Networks
Aviz Networks is a San Jose-based networking software company that helps enterprises run open, vendor-agnostic networks built on the open-source SONiC operating system and layered with AI. Its stack - ONES, Open Packet Broker, and the GenAI Network Copilot - lets organizations deploy, observe, and operate multi-vendor, multi-ASIC networks across the data center, edge, and AI factory without vendor lock-in, combining 24x7 SONiC support with orchestration, telemetry, and plain-language automation.
nEye.ai
nEye.ai (nEye Systems) is a Santa Clara semiconductor company building optical circuit switches (OCS) on a single chip. By fusing MEMS with silicon photonics and CMOS at wafer scale, its flagship SuperSwitch aims to move data between thousands of GPUs, CPUs and memory units with far less power and space than conventional electrical switching. Founded in 2020 by UC Berkeley photonics researchers and led by telecom-optics veteran Ashish Vengsarkar, the company raised an $80M Series C in April 2026, bringing total funding to about $152.5M as it scales foundry-based manufacturing for AI data centers.