USA (Commonwealth Union)_ In a move that is turning heads across the tech world, Nvidia has invested over $900 million (₹8,000 crore) to bring Indian-origin entrepreneur Rochan Sankar and his team on board. Sankar is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup that is tackling one of AI’s biggest hardware bottlenecks—connecting massive numbers of chips so they work together efficiently, like a single supercomputer.
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At the heart of Enfabrica’s breakthrough is a technology that enables tens of thousands of AI chips to operate together at high speed without the usual data slowdowns. This kind of scale is critical for training large AI models, where delays in data transfer can leave costly chips underused. Enfabrica’s solution solves this by building a high-speed fabric that connects up to 100,000 chips without bottlenecks, a capability that caught Nvidia’s attention.
Rather than simply acquiring the technology, Nvidia went further. The company not only licensed Enfabrica’s core technology but also hired Sankar and his entire engineering team. The deal mirrors recent talent-focused moves by other tech giants: Meta recently acquired a majority stake in Scale AI, and Google has been hiring aggressively from AI startups. Nvidia’s decision underscores how essential hardware innovation is becoming in the AI arms race.
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Rochan Sankar brings deep experience in semiconductors and networking. Before founding Enfabrica in 2019 (officially incorporated in 2020), he was a senior director at Broadcom, where he led the development of the Tomahawk and Trident chip families. He played a key role in advancing data center networking through standards like 25G Ethernet and white-box switching. He holds degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from Wharton, and has six patents to his name.
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Under Sankar’s leadership, Enfabrica has raised nearly $290 million across three funding rounds. The latest, a $115 million Series C round in 2024, valued the company at around $600 million, according to Pitchbook. The company’s flagship product, the Accelerated Compute Fabric Switch (ACF-S), combines networking and memory technologies to provide a faster, more efficient AI compute environment. Nvidia considers this more than merely a talent acquisition. It is a strategic step to ensure that its GPUs work optimally in the next generation of AI systems, and Rochan Sankar is at the vanguard of that effort.
