Data center developers are expected to spend as much as $4 trillion by the end of the decade — and they’re already heavily constrained by both political and power-grid considerations in where they can build. But while most treat the speed of fiber as a given, one company is betting that faster fiber could change the geographical math behind the data center buildout.

On Tuesday, Relativity Networks announced $22 million in SAFE note funding drawn by Rhapsody Venture Partners, Bell Ventures Inc., and Faster Than Glass LLC, among others. A SAFE note, in which an investment transfers into a specific numbers of shares once the company raises its first priced round, is a standard method used for pre-seed and seed rounds. The company also secured a $40 million follow-on order from a leading hyperscaler that declined to be named for this piece.

Relativity Networks deals in hollow-core fiber, a rarely deployed technology that allows data to be transmitted 30% faster than conventional fiber. Where traditional fiber transmits light through fiber-optic glass, hollow-core fiber transmits the same light through a vacuum chamber in the center of the line, bringing it far closer to the theoretical limit of light speed. 

The difference is a matter of microseconds. CEO Jason Eisenholz estimates that a signal takes roughly five microseconds to travel one kilometer in conventional fiber. By switching to hollow-core, that figure can be reduced to only three and a half microseconds.

When AI compute occurred across a single rack of GPUs, the fiber latency was easy to ignore — but as scale has grown, so has the physical distance between GPUs. Now, it’s common for a data center campus to sprawl across hundreds of acres and dozens of buildings. Eisenholz sees a particular opportunity for multi-campus deployments, in which pre-existing data centers are knit together to operate as a single unit.

“The largest systems are distributing the compute across multiple campuses to reach the power that exists,” he tells TechCrunch. “They’re moving to where the warm shell is, but they still need to operate as one synchronized machine.”

The result is a way to partially alleviate the harsh spatial logic that has restrained many ongoing data center buildouts. In latency terms, reducing time by 30% is giving developers an opportunity to span 30% larger distances before latency becomes a problem. As compute projects scale ever larger, Einholz thinks it could be a major shift for the industry.

“The first era of AI optimized for compute,” he said. “It was GPU, GPU, GPU. The second era optimized the networking inside the data center to take advantage of that compute. The third era that we see coming is optimizing the geography.”

For as long as anyone can remember, Github has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.

The AI startup, which is now officially a part of SpaceXAI, launched Origin this week — a new code hosting platform designed to do all of the things that developers typically use Github for: collaboratively work on codebases, browse and edit them, handle pull-requests (edits made by others asking to be added to the main codebase) and store them in repositories.

This seems like a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary focus up until this point has been selling automated web development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has also said that “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, although hasn’t shared many details yet. The company also says it is building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Interestingly enough, using Origin doesn’t require a user to stop using Github. Indeed, Origin is designed to allow developers to work alongside Github and pass code back and forth between the two in an interoperable manner.

“Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

The launch of Origin coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in Github’s services. Indeed, on the same day that Cursor launched its new platform, Github suffered a quite lengthy worldwide outage. For over six hours, the site’s functions were reportedly degraded, with a nearly 20 percent error rate worldwide.

This isn’t the first time in recent times when this has happened either. Earlier this year, after a rash of outages, Github announced new actions to sate unhappy coders as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, a recent analysis by LeadDev states. Such persistent issues have led to “a visible exodus of high-profile users” writes LeadDev’s reporter Charles Humble.

Still, if Cursor wants to compete with Github, it will have its work cut out for it. According to Github’s own metrics, some 180 million developers use its platform as of last October. The platform, which was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, continues to be the largest source code hosts in the world.

The Justice Department has launched a probe into Andreessen Horowitz regarding the firm’s partners serving on the boards of competing companies, Bloomberg reported.

The nearly year-long investigation focuses specifically on the firm’s board seats at Databricks, which is valued at $190 billion, and Fivetran, which combined with dbt Labs in June. The firm’s co-founder, Ben Horowitz, serves on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado serves on the board of Fivetran.

Several VCs told TechCrunch they were surprised by news of the probe. Databricks and Fivetran are competitors now, but the two companies weren’t rivals when a16z invested in the startups, according to another Databricks investor who spoke on condition of anonymity. Databricks is largely known for its cloud storage products but, with its Lakeflow product, has expanded into AI data pipelines and application connectors. That’s Fivetran’s main business.

Given that Andreessen Horowitz has backed hundreds of companies, it’s almost inevitable that some startups will pivot or expand into the same markets, becoming competitors.

While backing direct rivals has become more acceptable recently, as evidenced by the many VCs that funded both Anthropic and OpenAI, holding a board seat on competing startups creates a far greater conflict of interest. Directors are generally privy to much more sensitive strategic information than non-board investors ever see.  

Such conflicts can be resolved by having a partner step down from one of the boards. However, because Databricks and Fivetran have different individuals from the same VC firm on their boards, a16z can institute a so-called Chinese wall between Horowitz and Casado, which would prevent the two partners from sharing confidential information about the two companies with each other, one investor said.

The investigation invokes Section 8 of the Clayton Act, a 112-year-old law stating that an individual or entity is barred from serving on the boards of competing companies. Since regulators have rarely targeted venture capital with this rule, the industry is watching the DOJ’s probe closely. If a16z is forced to surrender a seat, founders may place less value on board commitments from top-tier VCs, given that those investors might be forced to step down if a portfolio overlap creates a future conflict.

a16z did not immediately respond to our request for comment, nor did it respond to Bloomberg. Databricks and DOJ declined comment.