PCIe Gen6 / CXL / UALink Retimer & Rack-Scale Connectivity ASIC — connectivity ASIC (retimer, switch, smart NIC)

PCIe Gen6 / CXL / UALink Retimer & Rack-Scale Connectivity ASIC — connectivity ASIC (retimer, switch, smart NIC)

Companies committing: Astera Labs, Enfabrica.

Opportunity: GB200/MI300 racks need PCIe Gen6 retimers, CXL memory pooling, and UALink scale-up — these are non-substitutable parts at the rack-board level. Hyperscalers have no second supplier of credible quality.

Astera Labs is hiring an entire Chip Lead + AI Fabric digital design + UALink program management cohort — they are explicitly going for the connectivity-ASIC-for-AI socket end-to-end (chip → firmware → rack architecture). Enfabrica is the disruptor angle (SuperNIC). This is the highest-conviction single-product-category bet visible in the dataset.