The crypto-mining startup that became the picks-and-shovels supplier of the AI boom - renting Nvidia GPUs to the labs building the future, one megacluster at a time.
3D Glass Solutions (3DGS) is an Albuquerque, New Mexico advanced-packaging company that turns its patented photosensitive APEX glass-ceramic into precise 3D microstructures for chips. Its wafer-level glass substrates, interposers and integrated passive devices serve RF, photonics, high-performance computing and defense customers who need low-loss, high-frequency, thermally stable packaging. Spun out of technology developed at Sandia National Laboratories and led by semiconductor veteran Babu Mandava, the ISO 9001 / AS9100 certified foundry has raised more than $54 million, counts Intel Capital, Applied Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures among its backers, and is a partner in DARPA's Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) program for U.S.-based 3D heterogeneous integration.
Ayar Labs is a San Jose-based semiconductor company building optical input/output (I/O) technology that moves data between chips using light instead of copper. Its silicon-photonics chiplets - the TeraPHY optical engine and the SuperNova multi-wavelength light source - are designed to be co-packaged directly with GPUs and other processors, letting AI and high-performance-computing systems scale across thousands of accelerators with far higher bandwidth and far lower power than electrical interconnects. Spun out of a DARPA-funded university research effort, the company raised a $500M Series E in 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and AMD.
Simr, formerly UberCloud, is a Los Altos, California company that automates engineering simulation in the cloud. Its SimOps (Simulation Operations Automation) platform lets design engineers run compute-heavy simulations - CFD, FEA and multi-physics workloads - on any cloud or on-premise hardware with leading tools like Ansys, Siemens and Dassault, without wrestling with the underlying HPC infrastructure. Founded in 2014 by Burak Yenier and Wolfgang Gentzsch, the company raised a $20M Series A in 2024 and counts major manufacturers and tech giants among its users.
Parallel Works is a Chicago-based software company, spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015, that builds ACTIVATE - a hybrid multi-cloud control plane for high-performance computing and AI. The platform gives researchers, engineers and defense teams a single interface to provision, orchestrate and share compute across on-premises clusters and the major clouds (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle), with built-in cost governance, role-based access and security controls. In 2025 ACTIVATE's High Security Platform became the first hybrid multi-cloud solution to earn a U.S. Department of Defense IL5 Authority to Operate.
minds.ai builds AI systems for semiconductor manufacturers. Its Maestro platform - powered by the DeepSim engine - uses reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and generative AI to optimize fab scheduling, planning, forecasting, and control inside 24/7 wafer-fabrication plants. Founded in 2014, the company is based in Santa Cruz, California, with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
Ceremorphic is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor startup building energy-efficient AI supercomputing silicon. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Venkat Mattela, the company taped out a first-of-its-kind 5nm HPC/AI chip on TSMC's most advanced node and is applying the same Hierarchical Learning Processor architecture to data center AI, robotics, automotive, and analog-AI-driven drug discovery.
Rescale is a San Francisco-based digital engineering platform that turns high-performance computing into an on-demand cloud utility. Founded in 2011 by ex-Boeing engineer Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, it gives scientists and engineers at companies like Samsung, Arm, General Motors Motorsports, and the U.S. Department of Defense a single workbench for simulation, AI physics, and multi-cloud orchestration.
WEKA builds a software-defined data platform engineered for AI and HPC workloads, feeding GPUs and CPUs with low-latency, high-throughput storage across on-prem, cloud, edge and hybrid environments. Its NeuralMesh architecture underpins hundreds of the world's largest AI deployments, including model builders, hyperscale neoclouds, and Fortune 50 enterprises.

Avicena Tech builds LightBundle, a microLED-based optical interconnect that moves data between chips at terabit-per-second densities while sipping sub-picojoules of energy per bit. The Sunnyvale company is betting that the GPU clusters powering AI need a new physical layer - one that copper can't deliver and traditional silicon photonics can't match on power.