Nexthop AI Raises $500M Series B for AI Data Center Networking

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AI networking startup Nexthop AI raised $500M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with a16z joining as major investor, targeting next-generation interconnects for AI data center clusters. The round is part of the largest startup funding month ever recorded: $189B globally in February 2026, up 780% YoY. Networking infrastructure has emerged as a distinct capital-intensive bottleneck alongside compute and power as AI cluster scale pushes beyond what existing data center interconnect architectures can handle.