My conversation with Penguin Solutions ( $PENG) and Astera Labs ( $ALAB) from Ai Infra Summit: Both working on CXL related solutions Astera is a $50B market cap company, and Penguin is a $2B market cap company, so there’s a huge size difference between the two I’m lumping them together because they do similar things at least in one of the lines of their business (Astera’s “Leo” CXL product, and Penguin’s compute solutions division) Penguin uses Astera Labs “Leo” controllers for their CXL offering (SMART) (although I guess the next generation will use Qualcomm if I remember correctly), but they layer on top more of a finished product experience primarily for enterprise users (not CSPs) who need some extra support beyond what Astera will provide. So their product is more suitable for Fintech/financial services, health care, and other industries where enterprise on-prem is in-demand These boards have DIM slots for LPDDR5 memory, which can be used to augment memory from GPUs (meaning a server tray can have less compute vis expensive GPUs by pooling in this board’s memory via LPDDR5) instead of having to either A. Have more GPUs ($$$) or B. Going all the way up to memory on the CPU which causes a big slowdown in memory access speeds. The next generation Astera “Leo 2” and Penguin’s next generation equivalent will both also be compatible with LPDDR4 Cool product. Can see the need, makes sense. I don’t know how defensible Penguin’s business here is though, I guess it’s niche enough that Astera is focused elsewhere, but I imagine that if on-prem got lucrative enough maybe Astera would come after it (many such cases across the showroom floor)