Oxide Computer Inc. has raised $445 million in a Series D funding round, the data center hardware startup announced. Eclipse Capital, an existing investor in the company, led the round. The raise also drew participation from AMD Ventures, Riot Ventures, Jane Street, Atreides Management and USIT, the investor that led Oxide's prior $200 million round in February.
Oxide sells a pre-integrated data center rack that bundles computing, storage and networking equipment into a single package. The product holds 24 hardware modules the company calls sleds. Each sled carries a central processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. with up to 144 cores, paired with roughly 1.64 terabytes of memory and as much as 300 terabytes of flash storage.
A custom chip, the Oxide Server Processor, supports the core components of each sled. It regulates operating temperatures inside the module, manages power flow and handles firmware updates. Two switches connect the rack's sleds, using a custom routing protocol that maintains a continuously updated map of the rack's internal network. When that map flags a malfunctioning networking component, the switches steer traffic around it to prevent slowdowns.
The rack's storage side carries its own reliability features. Each record is written in three copies across separate flash modules for redundancy, while a checksum mechanism runs in the background to detect data errors that need resolution. Two power shelves feed electricity to the sleds, storage equipment and switches. Each shelf holds six rectifiers that step down incoming voltage for use by chips, along with a modified version of the Oxide Service Processor that monitors shelf health and energy consumption.
Customers can divide an Oxide rack's hardware into multiple virtual networks, letting an organization such as a software company give each engineering team its own environment. A built-in firewall governs traffic between those environments.
Oxide co-founder and Chief Executive Steve Tuck said the pace of on-premises cloud computing projects has forced the company to expand manufacturing capacity by 20 times over the past 12 months, and that demand still outstrips supply. He said the funding will let Oxide invest in the materials and manufacturing scale its customers need in the years ahead.
The company also plans to revise its rack design. In August, Oxide disclosed plans for a version of its computing sled that can host a graphics card, and it hinted it will pursue an AMD partnership on that effort.
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