Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger bets on Nagare Labs to vault the memory wall

What happened

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who became a partner at investor Playground Global last year, is betting on Nagare Labs, a startup founded by Georgia Institute of Technology professors Suman Datta and Shimeng Yu, which is developing a new memory technology called Z2RAM based on oxide semiconductors. Z2RAM aims to combine SRAM-like speed, density much closer to DRAM, and NAND-like manufacturing, with a promised bit density upwards of 5x that of SRAM in its first incarnation (a 64MB SRAM tile corresponding to 320MB of Z2RAM capacity), designed for integration directly onto compute logic using 3D hybrid bonding. The company has closed its first seed funding round and now has $5 million to further development; the technology is still at the lab-prototype stage, and Nagare is looking for an R&D fab partner, with the goal of sampling working Z2RAM memory tiles within the next four years and production shipments within the next decade. Challenges include the lack of an open standard for 3D bonding integration (Nagare may have to design an interface itself) and reliability concerns with oxide semiconductors (atomic vacancies and single- or few-electron effects shifting transistor threshold voltage).

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: The Register · 10/26/2026 · View original source