NextSilicon has tapped Rupal Hollenbeck as its new President and Chief Business Officer, a move that signals the company is gearing up for wider commercial rollouts of its AI and HPC compute platforms.
Leadership shake-up at NextSilicon
Rupal Hollenbeck will run NextSilicon’s global go-to-market engine, overseeing sales, marketing, communications, strategic partnerships, business development, and customer engagement and success.
She joins as the company pushes to broaden adoption of its Maverick Intelligent Compute Architecture and accelerate its Arbel RISC?V processor roadmap.
With more than 30 years in tech, Hollenbeck most recently served as President of Check Point Software Technologies, where she led the company’s worldwide commercial organization.
Before that, she was CMO at Cerebras Systems and SVP/CMO at Oracle, and she spent over two decades at Intel in senior roles across the U.S. and Asia, including global data center sales and Intel China.
Turning the company’s technical edge into scalable revenue
NextSilicon is moving from early deployments to higher-volume commercial use, and Hollenbeck’s mandate is to turn the company’s technical edge into scalable revenue, deeper customer relationships, and strategic partnerships.
That includes operationalizing growth as AI workloads shift from single tasks to fast-changing, agentic and multimodal pipelines that demand better utilization, smarter memory movement, and end-to-end efficiency.
Maverick?2 in the field
The company’s Maverick-2 accelerator is already running at dozens of customer sites around the world.
A flagship installation is the Spectra supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, which recently earned full system acceptance under the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vanguard program after clearing performance, stability, and application-compatibility hurdles on mission-relevant workloads.
Maverick-2 was built for exactly this kind of environment, a hardware that adapts to software in real time so customers can accelerate evolving workloads without expensive code rewrites or vendor lock-in.
Doubling down on RISC-V with Arbel
Alongside Maverick, NextSilicon is increasing investment in its server-class RISC-V roadmap with Arbel, an enterprise-grade processor architecture aimed at AI infrastructure and HPC.
The company has outlined plans to productize Arbel into 64-core and 128-core enterprise processors for AI and HPC, with availability expected in Q1 2028 and target frequencies around 3.4 GHz to support strong single-thread performance for serial and agentic workflows.
Together, Maverick and Arbel reflect NextSilicon’s broader push to rethink the compute platform across CPUs, accelerators, memory, networking, and software.
What Hollenbeck will focus on next
As deployments scale, Hollenbeck will build and lead the organization responsible for translating NextSilicon’s technology leadership into broader customer adoption, strategic partnerships, and sustainable global growth.
That includes working closely with the executive team to strengthen commercial execution and deepen relationships with customers and partners worldwide.
Leadership Comments
“I’ve spent meaningful time with Rupal and came away convinced that she is the person I want alongside the leadership team and me for this next chapter,” said Elad Raz, Founder and CEO of NextSilicon. “We are at a critical point, scaling Maverick in HPC, expanding into AI, and building our CPU roadmap with Arbel. Rupal brings the experience, judgment, and ambition we need, and I’m incredibly excited to build the future of compute with her.”
“As AI systems become more agentic and workflow-driven, NextSilicon’s Maverick product line is increasingly able to adapt in real time, so customers can keep pace without constantly rebuilding their infrastructure,” said Hollenbeck. “What drew me to the company is a tremendously talented team that has proven that the technology works in production and delivers true global impact.”
To Know More About Spectra Deployment at Sandia: CLICK HERE
To Kow More About Arbel Roadmap: CLICK HERE
