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.

Before AI clusters made data movement fashionable, Kianoosh Naghshineh spent decades moving networking work off the CPU. His patient bet on open Ethernet now runs straight into the industry's most urgent bottleneck.