Breaking: Google Buys Stealthy Startup Agnilux

Update: Google has purchased a stealthy startup called Agnilux, the company told us. The news was first  reported on PEHub. “We’re pleased to welcome the Agnilux team to Google, but we don’t have any additional information to share right now,” a Google spokesperson said.

Agnilux was founded by engineers (including Don Dobberpuhl) who formerly worked at startup PA Semi, which Apple purchased in 2008. The startup is supposedly making some type of server. Google buying such a company could go a long way toward proving that for webscale data centers there’s nothing like tweaking your infrastructure — from the silicon up.

We’ve written about SeaMicro, which is making its own specialty server using Atom chips, and Smooth-Stone, which is using its chip design expertise to build an ARM-based server, and discussed today how the tide might be turning when it comes to commodity infrastructure. If Google has purchased this startup with the goal of making its own servers run more efficiently, or to adapt them to Google-specific compute needs, that’s a huge bet on specialty hardware for webscale computing.