Oxide Raises $445M to Scale Rack-Level Cloud Hardware

SiliconANGLE reported that Oxide Computer has raised $445 million in Series D funding to expand production of its pre-integrated data centre racks, turning a hardware capacity constraint into the center of its next manufacturing push.

Returning investor Eclipse Capital led the round, with AMD Ventures, Riot Ventures, Jane Street, Atreides Management and USIT also participating.

USIT had led Oxide’s previous $200 million financing in February, giving the startup a second large raise in the same year as demand for on-premises cloud infrastructure outstrips supply.

The company’s product is not a single server.

Oxide sells a rack-scale system that combines compute, storage and networking in one package.

Each rack contains 24 hardware modules, known as sleds, and each sled can carry an Advanced Micro Devices central processing unit with up to 144 cores, about 1.64 terabytes of memory and as much as 300 terabytes of flash storage.

That integrated design is the commercial argument behind the funding.

Oxide is pitching a factory-built alternative to assembling servers, switches, storage and management software from separate vendors.

The rack also includes a custom Oxide Server Processor in each sled to manage operating temperatures, power flow and firmware updates.

Networking and resilience features add another layer to the system.

Two switches connect the sleds and use a custom routing protocol to maintain a current view of the rack’s internal network.

If a component fails, traffic can be routed around the problem to avoid slowdowns.

Storage reliability is handled through three copies of each record across different flash modules, with checksum checks running in the background to detect data errors.

Power is supplied by two shelves, each with six rectifiers that lower incoming current for chip use.

A modified version of the Oxide Service Processor tracks the shelves’ health and energy usage, extending the same management approach from compute modules into the rack’s power layer.

Customers can divide the hardware into multiple virtual networks, allowing a software company, for example, to separate environments for different engineering teams.

Built-in firewall controls regulate traffic between those environments.

Oxide also plans to use the new capital for product upgrades.

In August, the company disclosed work on a computing sled that can host a graphics card and signaled that AMD may become a partner in that effort.

Tuck tied the raise directly to production capacity, saying on-premises cloud projects forced Oxide to expand manufacturing 20-fold over the past year.

The new investment is meant to fund materials and factory scale while customer orders still mean “demand still exceeds supply.”