NextSilicon, a company developing next-generation computing solutions for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), has appointed Rupal Hollenbeck as president and chief business officer. In this new role, she'll oversee all of the company's go-to-market activities, including sales, marketing, communications, strategic partnerships, business development, and customer engagement. Hollenbeck joins as NextSilicon works to expand adoption of its Maverick Intelligent Compute Architecture platform and advance its Arbel RISC-V processor roadmap.
The hire comes as AI workloads shift from single, well-defined tasks toward more dynamic, agentic, and multimodal workflows, requiring infrastructure that can continuously adapt to changing demands around utilization, memory movement, and overall efficiency. NextSilicon's Maverick-2 chip is designed to meet that challenge by adjusting to software in real time, letting customers handle shifting workloads without expensive code rewrites or becoming locked into a specific vendor. Hollenbeck will work closely with NextSilicon's executive team to strengthen commercial execution, deepen relationships with customers and partners, and help operationalize the company's broader growth.
Elad Raz, founder and CEO of NextSilicon, said that after spending meaningful time with Hollenbeck, he came away convinced she's the right person to have alongside the leadership team for this next phase of the company. He said NextSilicon is at a critical point, scaling Maverick in HPC, expanding into AI, and building out its CPU roadmap with Arbel, and that Hollenbeck brings the experience, judgment, and ambition needed for that work.
Hollenbeck brings more than 30 years of experience across enterprise computing, semiconductors, AI, cybersecurity, sales, marketing, and global operations. She most recently served as president of Check Point Software Technologies, where she led the company's global go-to-market organization. Before that, she served as chief marketing officer at Cerebras Systems and as senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Oracle. Earlier in her career, she spent more than 23 years at Intel in executive roles across the U.S. and Asia, including leading global data center sales and running Intel's business in China.
Hollenbeck said that as AI systems become more agentic and workflow-driven, NextSilicon's Maverick product line is increasingly able to adapt in real time, letting customers keep pace without constantly rebuilding their infrastructure. She said what drew her to the company was a highly talented team that has already proven the technology works in production and delivers real global impact.
NextSilicon's Maverick-2 accelerator is already deployed at dozens of customer sites worldwide, including the Spectra supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, which recently achieved full system acceptance under the Vanguard program after meeting performance, stability, and application-compatibility requirements while running mission-relevant workloads.
The company is also increasing investment in its server-class RISC-V computing roadmap centered on Arbel, an enterprise-grade processor architecture designed to meet the evolving needs of AI infrastructure and HPC. Together, these efforts reflect NextSilicon's broader ambition to rethink computing platforms across CPUs, accelerators, memory, networking, and software.
As the company moves toward higher-volume commercial deployment, Hollenbeck will build and lead the organization responsible for turning NextSilicon's technical capabilities into broader customer adoption, strategic partnerships, and long-term global growth.
