Upscale AI Launches Token Fabric to Connect Chips from Rival Suppliers
The Nvidia-backed startup, valued at $2 billion in June, is releasing a platform that combines its own switch silicon with Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet gear to let data centre operators mix accelerators from different vendors without building separate networking systems for each.
Upscale AI launched Token Fabric on Thursday, a hardware and software platform designed to connect AI processors across a data centre regardless of supplier. The company, which raised a $190 million extension in June from Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and Temasek, is betting that neoclouds and hyperscalers building heterogeneous clusters will pay for a unified networking layer rather than integrating separate systems for each chip vendor (Reuters, 2026).
Token Fabric combines three elements: Upscale's SkyFabriX scale-up switch silicon, scale-out switches built on Nvidia's Spectrum-X Ethernet technology, and software that identifies bottlenecks and flags equipment needing replacement. CEO Barun Kar said he expects revenue from the platform to reach the tens of millions next year, potentially climbing into the low hundreds of millions (Reuters, 2026). The first component, which connects groups of AI chips within a data centre, ships in the fourth quarter, with the full platform rolling out through 2027.
The market opportunity is substantial. Dell'Oro forecasts nearly $1 trillion in AI back-end switch spending through 2030, with Ethernet becoming the leading scale-up technology, while 650 Group projects AI networking will surpass $200 billion by 2030 (Upscale AI, 2026). The company's pitch is that its open, standards-based architecture avoids the vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary interconnects.
BuiltWorld AI Operational Take: The networking layer is becoming the bottleneck that determines whether expensive accelerators actually run at full utilisation. Token Fabric's value hinges on integration execution across two very different silicon environments: Upscale's SkyFabriX and Nvidia's Spectrum-X. Operators evaluating heterogeneous clusters should test whether the software layer can genuinely unify telemetry and failure detection across both, because a networking fabric that adds operational complexity rather than reducing it defeats the purpose of standardisation.
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