The inference stack expands across software, cloud and optical hardware
d-Matrix and Nscale are expanding deployment layers through acquisitions while Olix raises new capital for optical inference hardware; the three moves remain at different stages.
Artificial Intelligence··Morning
Software and staff added to d-Matrix
Inference-chip maker d-Matrix has acquired Wallaroo.ai, which builds software for deploying and orchestrating AI inference workloads; the terms were not disclosed. According to the company's 3 August announcement, Wallaroo.ai's technology platform, intellectual property and engineering expertise will move to d-Matrix. Staff from engineering, product and go-to-market teams are also joining. The acquisition follows d-Matrix's purchase of GigaIO's data-centre business in April. d-Matrix chief executive Sid Sheth identifies operational complexity alongside performance as an obstacle to putting inference to work. Wallaroo.ai chief executive Vid Jain says the combined platform will be far ahead of the market; both assessments are company claims. The announcement also says the Corsair inference platform is in full production and shipping to priority customers. Its named deployment is the placement of Corsair beside NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architectures in Parasail's cloud data centre in early July. The release gives no shipment count, names no priority customer and supplies no shipping dates. The acquisition therefore clearly expands the company's software and staff, while the hardware scale in the same announcement remains a production-status statement without a unit count.[1]
Nscale reaches from infrastructure to workloads
Nscale's agreement to acquire Anyscale builds a similar expansion at cloud level. The price was not disclosed, and closing is expected in the second half of 2026, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Nscale is an AI cloud provider that operates its own graphics processors, data centres and power infrastructure. Anyscale's platform, built on the open-source Ray framework, distributes data processing, model training, fine-tuning, inference and reinforcement learning across thousands of graphics processors. Nscale chief executive Josh Payne says the combination puts work from processing data through deploying agents in one place. Anyscale chief executive Keerti Melkote describes the result as the first full-stack AI hyperscaler. The report gives no independent measurement supporting those scale and cost claims. The development established today is that an infrastructure operator has agreed to buy the software company that manages distributed workloads. Completion still depends on future conditions and approvals. Nscale's move covers a broader cloud layer than the d-Matrix acquisition, but both point in the same direction: a provider that owns physical infrastructure is bringing workload-management software into its own organisation.[2]
Olix's hardware plan for 2027
Olix took the financing route on the same day, announcing a $312 million Series C round to develop optical inference hardware. Arm Holdings and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings joined the round, which valued the company at $3.3 billion, roughly triple its previous valuation. Hardware using the DX-1 chip is planned to ship in the first half of 2027. The company says the chip is designed for the decode phase of large language models and keeps the model in fast on-chip SRAM, improving energy efficiency and reducing latency. Chip-to-chip communication uses slow and wide optical links with NRZ encoding instead of fast PAM4 channels. According to Olix, DX-1 can process more than 10,000 tokens per second on models with 100 billion parameters, while several X-1 racks can be clustered for models with 10 trillion parameters. The batch size, latency target and numerical precision behind those figures are not stated. Together, the three reports show the inference stack expanding from deployment software through cloud management to optical hardware. Their stages remain different, however: d-Matrix reports a completed acquisition, Nscale has signed a conditional deal, and Olix has raised capital for hardware it plans to ship next year.[1], [2], [3]
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