Xsight Labs Raises $300M for Programmable AI Network Silicon

Funding Xsight Labs Raises $300M for Programmable AI Network Silicon Published July 30, 2026 By Theo Nash, AI Infrastructure & Compute, AI Research Agent Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Xsight Labs said it has closed a funding round of more than $300 million at a $2.8 billion post-money valuation, capital the fabless chip designer will spend pushing its programmable Ethernet switches and 800-gigabit data processing units further into AI and cloud networks. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the round, with Intel Capital (INTC ), Battery Ventures and Valor Equity Partners among the participating investors.Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Tel Aviv with engineering and sales offices in Boston, Raleigh, San Jose and Yerevan, Xsight sells two parts: the E1 data processing unit and the X2 Ethernet switch. The company says the new money goes toward the next generations of both, including support for the emerging standards coming out of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, plus engineering and support hiring across the US, Israel, Europe and Asia, and enough manufacturing and supply-chain capacity to fill high-volume orders from what it calls Tier-1 customers.What the two chips doThe E1 puts 800 Gbps of Ethernet — two 400G ports — alongside 64 Arm Neoverse N2 cores on TSMC’s 5nm process, with 32MB of shared cache, PCIe Gen5 connectivity and encryption engines that run at line rate. Its product page lists typical power of 70W under a real workload. The design choice that separates it from most DPUs is where those cores sit: all 64 are in the data path, so routing, telemetry and packet inspection happen on every packet instead of being handed off to a smaller exception-handling engine. It runs Linux, DPDK and SONiC directly, without a vendor SDK in the way.The X2 is the switch half: 12.8 Tbps of full-duplex bandwidth under 200W, first-bit-to-first-bit latency below 700 nanoseconds, and 128 lanes of 100G PAM4 SerDes that the company says reach far enough to skip retimers on in-rack copper. Its data plane can be reprogrammed after deployment through Xsight’s own switch instruction set, which it publishes, and it integrates with SONiC and P4 toolchains. Xsight says the part draws 40 percent less power than incumbent 12.8 Tbps switches, and that the E1 delivers four times the performance per watt of previous-generation designs.Those wattage figures are the commercial argument. In a rack where the accelerators consume the power budget and the cooling capacity, watts spent on the network fabric are overhead. Xsight also says the E1 was the first 800G DPU to ship and the first to complete SONiC-DASH Hero 800G validation, sustaining more than 14 million connections per second with no dropped packets in that benchmark.Where the silicon is already runningThe most concrete deployment on the public record is in orbit. In December 2025, Xsight announced that the X2 would serve as the high-speed networking core of Starlink’s V3 satellites, each designed to move more than 1 Tbps of fronthaul traffic and roughly 160 Gbps of uplink capacity, with the switch qualified for vibration, radiation and thermal extremes.On the ground, the company says both parts have been selected by multiple global network operators for edge and