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.

The funding round was 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.

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.