Cornelis Networks raised $205 million led by IAG Capital Partners on 14 September to scale its Active Compute Fabric — a high-speed interconnect architecture for AI data centres that positions directly against Nvidia's InfiniBand networking. The funding targets Nvidia's second competitive moat: after GPU processing capability, InfiniBand is the most significant lock-in mechanism in AI infrastructure, controlling high-bandwidth links between GPU clusters that determine distributed training and inference performance. Cornelis claims Active Compute Fabric delivers higher bandwidth at lower latency at equivalent scale, with an open architecture that avoids single-vendor interconnect dependency. Independent performance benchmarks against InfiniBand at production scale have not been published.