(Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. veteran Lisa Spelman will become chief executive officer of Cornelis Networks, a startup spun off from the chipmaker in 2020 that aims to capitalize on the AI boom.
Spelman, who helped oversee Intel’s data-center business, will step into the new role on Aug. 15, Cornelis said on Thursday.
Cornelis’ networking technology links up different servers within data centers so they can work on the same problem together like one brain. Such an approach is becoming increasingly useful for the development of artificial intelligence models. It can help harness an entire data center to deliver massive, coordinated computing power.
Nvidia Corp., whose processors are vital to AI software, offers a competing technology called InfiniBand that it acquired as part of its roughly $7 billion purchase of Mellanox in 2020.
Spelman worked at Intel for more than two decades, serving most recently as a corporate vice president in the Data Center and AI Group. Cornelis, based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, first came together within that division.
Philip Murphy, a co-founder of Cornelis, developed the technology at Intel and had been the startup’s CEO. He will now take the role of chief operating officer. Intel, meanwhile, retains a minority stake in Cornelis.
As far as prospective customers, Cornelis is going after both cloud service providers and companies setting up their own data centers. Spelman estimates that the total market for the technology is about $20 billion.
“We will continue to work with Intel and look to them as a customer base, but just in the same way that we do so with others in the industry,” she said in an interview, adding that Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is also a client.
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