Xsight raises $300m to challenge Nvidia on AI networking

This article was published on July 31, 2026 The AI boom made GPUs famous. The chips that connect thousands of them are quietly becoming just as valuable, and Nvidia dominates that layer too. Israel’s Xsight Labs has raised more than $300m at a $2.8bn valuation to sell an open, programmable alternative. It is already flying on SpaceX’s Starlink V3 satellites. The AI boom made GPUs famous. The dull chips that wire thousands of those GPUs together are quietly becoming just as valuable. Xsight Labs, an Israeli chipmaker, has raised more than $300 million at a $2.8 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. Fidelity led the round. That is more than five times what the company was worth in 2021, a jump it made in a single year. Xsight builds the plumbing of the AI data centre. Its two chips, the E1 processor and the X2 switch, shuttle data between servers, memory and networks. As models grow, moving that data has become one of the industry’s tightest bottlenecks, and the wiring between GPUs is now a prize of its own. Nvidia does not just sell the GPUs. It also dominates the networking layer, which it bought its way into with Mellanox. Xsight’s pitch is the opposite of that closed kit. Its c