Santa Clara, California, USA: NVIDIA has brought on board Rochan Sankar, an Indian-origin entrepreneur and the founder, president, and CEO of the Silicon Valley-based AI hardware company Enfabrica, through a deal reportedly worth over $900 million in cash and stock. As part of the arrangement, NVIDIA is also licensing significant portions of Enfabrica’s interconnect technology and integrating several of its core engineers into the company, according to multiple industry sources.
Sankar’s background in chip architecture and data-centre networking positions him to play a major role in expanding NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure and networking strategy. The move highlights NVIDIA’s ongoing shift from being primarily a GPU manufacturer to becoming a complete systems and AI-computing solutions provider.
A graduate of the University of Toronto, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Sankar also holds an MBA from the Wharton School. Prior to establishing Enfabrica, he worked at Broadcom as a senior director, leading its data-centre Ethernet-switch silicon division. He was instrumental in developing multiple generations of Broadcom’s popular Tomahawk and Trident chip series. At Enfabrica, he oversaw the architecture, data-centre fabric design, and strategic product planning, and he holds several patents in these domains.
NVIDIA’s decision to acquire Sankar’s expertise and team reflects the growing understanding that AI performance relies not only on compute power but also on networking efficiency, memory bandwidth, and interconnect design. Enfabrica’s innovations address these needs by reducing system bottlenecks and enabling the seamless linking of tens of thousands of GPUs into large, unified clusters—an increasingly vital capability as organisations train more complex AI models.
Analysts describe the deal as a mix between an “acqui-hire” and a technology licensing arrangement, rather than a complete acquisition. Both NVIDIA and Enfabrica have chosen not to disclose the detailed terms of the agreement.
For Rochan Sankar, the transition marks a shift from startup founder to senior leader at one of the world’s most influential AI hardware companies. For NVIDIA, this strategic move emphasises a deeper commitment to advancing the AI infrastructure ecosystem, spanning networking, interconnects, and large-scale system integration. The long-term impact of this collaboration will become clearer as NVIDIA incorporates Enfabrica’s technology into its upcoming AI platforms.
