Two entrepreneurial teams from Intel's former networking business are targeting NVIDIA's Scale-up interconnect territory. Cornelis Networks, founded by the core team after Intel spun off its Omni-Path Architecture business in 2020, announced on September 14 a $205 million financing and launched the Active Compute Fabric, an open network architecture integrating programmable computing and cross-scale horizontal and vertical expansion, marking its first entry into the Scale-up track. Its mass-produced CN5000 mainly addresses Scale-out, with switches providing 48 400Gb/s ports and Director-level devices up to 576 400Gb/s ports. Meanwhile, an "anti-NVLink Alliance" of 115 industry giants is accelerating assembly to break a single vendor's monopoly, while NVIDIA is playing its "NVLink Fusion" card to replicate CUDA's success at the hardware layer. A full-scale hardware showdown over next-generation AI data center dominance has broken out.