LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Finchetto, a company developing the world’s first fully-optical passive network switch for energy-efficient AI, has today announced the appointment of Drew Nelson OBE as a Non-Executive Director. Drew joined the Board, and this news follows a spate of awards in November with Finchetto winning ‘Hottest European Pre-seed Company’ at The Europas Awards and beating over 250 start-ups to become the winner of Deeptech Demo Day 2024.
Dr. Drew Nelson FREng, FInstP, DSc OBE is a global leader in the semiconductor industry, bringing to Finchetto decades of experience in scaling global semiconductor businesses and shaping international semiconductor policy. Drew was formerly the Founder, CEO and President of IQE Plc, scaling the company to establish a global manufacturing footprint across Europe, the U.S. and Asia with revenues of £178 million. Drew was also the Founder and Chairman of Newport Wafer Fab (acq. 2024 Vishay Intertechnology, Inc.), previously served as a Scientific Advisory Board Member of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre (SMART) and was a UK Member Representative for the European Commission’s High-Level Group on Key Enabling Technologies. Drew is an Advisory Board Member of Ohio University and currently serves as Chairman of the Advisory Board of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Semiconductors.
Finchetto is helping to solve the biggest challenge facing AI today: the energy demands of data centres and hyperscalers, which consume over 2% of the world’s energy supply and rising. To accelerate AI, data centre technology must become more energy efficient.
Conventional network switches are the power-hungry workhorses of every data centre, accounting for 20% of every data centre’s total energy requirement. Finchetto’s breakthrough solution – the world’s first fully-optical passive network switch – makes networking fundamentally more efficient, reducing total data centre energy demands by up to 20%, while offering extreme efficiency, ultra-low latency, and virtually unlimited through-put.
Compared to the current industry-leading switches, Finchetto’s first generation network switch achieves up to a 53x reduction in power requirements. Finchetto’s fully-optical, passive architecture removes the need for electronics within the network switch, enabling ultra-low latency networking and next-generation network topologies such as Intel’s PolarFly for massively distributed compute.
Finchetto’s technology also has significant applications in High-Performance Compute (HPC) and Telecommunications delivering higher throughput and lower latency networking.
Drew Nelson OBE said: “I am excited to join this pioneering and fast-growing company as a Non-Executive Director. Finchetto’s innovative fully-optical and passive network switch architecture will end the traditional trade-offs between power and performance in data centres. Additionally, Finchetto’s network switch has been designed from first principles to work with existing data centre infrastructure, meaning switching to this next generation of A|-efficient network switches is seamless for OEMs and data centres.”
Mark Rushworth, Founder and CEO of Finchetto said, “We’re delighted to welcome Drew to our board, a global pioneer and leader in the Semiconductor industry. Drew’s experience and expertise will help us scale Finchetto globally and transform data centre networking to efficiently accelerate AI. The energy demands of AI will always outpace our ability to increase power grid capacity – to unlock AI’s potential sustainably, it’s vital that data centres adopt AI-efficient technologies, and the network switch is a great place to start.”
About Finchetto:
Finchetto has developed the world’s first fully optical passive network switch for data centres, hyperscalers, High-Performance Compute and telecommunications. Designed from first principles to enable energy-efficient AI, Finchetto’s groundbreaking architecture reduces power consumption by up to 53x and latency by up to 40x compared to traditional network switches.
Enabling super-low power, ultra-low latency packet switching at the speed of light with massive throughput, Finchetto’s network switch will accelerate AI efficiently and sustainably and reduce global data centre energy demands by up to 20%.
To learn more, visit: https://www.finchetto.com
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