BlockBeats News, June 22nd, AI infrastructure startup Upscale AI announced the completion of a $190 million new funding round, with investors including Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, bringing the company's valuation to $2 billion.

This round of funding is part of its Series A-1 round, bringing Upscale AI's total funding to $500 million. The round was led by Premji Invest, with participation from new investors such as Temasek, Seligman Ventures, and continued investment from existing shareholders including Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global.

Upscale AI focuses on the network infrastructure of large-scale AI clusters, aiming to address the "compute-communication bottleneck" in AI training and inference. The company is developing a full-stack AI network architecture covering chips, systems, and software, with the goal of creating an open-standard network interconnect solution suitable for large-scale AI workloads.

The company stated that as AI cluster sizes continue to grow, network performance is becoming a key limiting factor affecting GPU utilization and training efficiency. Inefficient interconnects directly lead to wasted compute resources and increased training costs.

Currently, Upscale AI has partnered with several hyperscale cloud providers and "new cloud" infrastructure providers for evaluation and deployment, but has not disclosed specific customer information.

Analysts point out that AI infrastructure investments are expanding from the model layer to the underlying hardware and network layers, with network interconnect becoming one of the most closely watched key infrastructure tracks following GPUs.