Chinese startup Tanwei raises hundreds of millions of yuan to challenge Nvidia's NVLink
What's the deal? Beijing-based Tanwei Chiplink (探微芯联), a startup spun out of Tsinghua University's brain-inspired computing research centre, has closed multiple funding rounds — angel+ and Pre-A — totalling several hundred million yuan. The company is building China's first fully self-developed scale-up interconnect solution that benchmarks directly against Nvidia's NVLink + NVSwitch architecture.
Backers include state-backed funds such as Jinpu InvestmentDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Capital Science and Technology Development Group, Guozhong Capital, and Zhongguancun Science CityDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, alongside strategic investors Inspur and Softpower, plus market-oriented VCs including Huagai Capital, Fengnian Capital, Sinovation Ventures, and others. Proceeds will fund R&D, team expansion, and commercialisation.
Why now? As large language models scale exponentially, communication between XPUs (accelerator chips) has become the critical bottleneck in training clusters. Nvidia dominates this layer with its proprietary NVLink and NVSwitch stack, and US export restrictions make that technology increasingly hard for Chinese firms to access.
Tanwei's proprietary ACCLink + ACCSwitch technology covers everything from low-level communication protocols and switching ASICs to software-level collective communication libraries and dynamic routing algorithms. Its switch chip supports interconnecting up to 4,096 XPUs. The ACCLink IP has already completed silicon verification on the endpoint side, and the company is co-developing next-generation AI chips with domestic XPU makers.
What could go wrong? The scale-up interconnect space still lacks a unified protocol standard in China, meaning Tanwei must juggle compatibility across multiple proprietary specs. Competing against Nvidia's deeply entrenched ecosystem — and keeping pace with its rapid product cadence — is an enormous engineering and commercial challenge for a startup.
Revenue depends on domestic XPU vendors adopting Tanwei's stack in their next-generation silicon, a process that locks both sides into long co-development cycles with uncertain timelines.
The signal: The investor mix here is telling: the round is anchored by state-backed funds (Jinpu Investment, Guozhong Capital, Capital Science and Technology Development Group) and strategic corporates such as Inspur GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, one of China's largest server manufacturers, signalling that interconnect self-sufficiency is now treated as a national infrastructure priority rather than a niche semiconductor bet. As AI training clusters scale toward tens of thousands of XPUs, the networking layer — not the chip itself — is emerging as the binding constraint, and Tanwei's bid to offer a vendor-neutral, multi-protocol switch fabric could position it as the connective tissue across China's fragmented domestic accelerator ecosystem.
Read more: 36kr.com
