5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending April 3, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Intel, Mistral AI, Treeline and NetBox Labs as well as a shout-out to the winner of CRN’s 2026 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

The Week Ending April 3

Topping this week’s 5 Companies that Came to Win list is Intel which, seeing growing demand for its CPUs, is spending big bucks to acquire full ownership of its advanced semiconductor plant in Ireland.

Also making the list is Mistral AI, which raised $830 million to construct a major data center in Europe powered by 13,800 Nvidia GB300 AI GPUs. IT services startup Treeline is here for raising $25 million in Series A funding to further develop an MSP business designed to fully leverage AI capabilities. And NetBox Labs wins kudos for establishing a strategic partnership with solution provider heavyweight Ahead built around the NetBox open-source network and infrastructure management stack.

And a round of applause for Scott Barlow, chief evangelist and global head of community at cybersecurity provider Sophos, who was the winner of the CRN 2026 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Intel Gives Bullish CPU Outlook With $14.2B Ireland Fab Deal

Intel this week said it will spend $14.2 billion to repurchase the minority interest held by a private equity firm in a joint venture related to its fabrication plant in Ireland.

The semiconductor giant said the new deal that it reached with private equity firm Apollo represents a reversal of the agreement they struck in 2024 for Apollo to buy a 49 percent minority stake in the joint venture for Intel’s Fab 34 in Ireland. Apollo paid $11 billion for minority ownership of the joint venture.

The joint venture was originally meant to provide Intel with “significant financial flexibility” and enable it to divert funds for the development of advanced manufacturing nodes such as Intel 18A. The deal was part of the company’s “smart capital” strategy devised under former CEO Pat Gelsinger.

But the chipmaker said this week’s move to fully own Fab 34 reflects its “continued business momentum” with CPUs and a “significantly strengthened balance sheet.”

Intel’s optimism about its CPU business is based on what it called the “growing and essential role CPUs play in the era of AI.” In recent months, Intel has said it is experiencing higher-than-expected demand for its server CPUs due to the ongoing AI data center buildout, with the rise of agentic AI workloads putting greater emphasis on such processors.

Mistral AI Raises $830M For Data Center With 13,800 Nvidia GPUs

Mistral AI got everyone’s attention this week when the AI startup said it had raised $830 million to fund a major data center push in Europe, including a new data center facility in Paris that will deliver 44 megawatts of compute capacity.

The data center, expected to be operational in the second quarter of this year, will be based on Nvidia Grace Blackwell infrastructure including 13,800 GB300 AI GPUs, according to the company.

Mistral AI said the Paris data center will be “cutting edge” and is part of a broader strategy to scale compute capacity across Europe, with Mistral targeting 200 megawatts of total capacity.

Mistral AI has been increasingly focused on building its own data center infrastructure to reduce reliance on other cloud providers and to support growing demand in Europe.

“Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,” Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in a statement.

Treeline Secures $25M Series A Funding For AI-Powered MSP

IT services startup Treeline this week raised $25 million in Series A funding to further develop an MSP business born in the artificial intelligence era that looks to challenge solution providers still operating under decades-old practices.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the funding round, which will help San Francisco-based Treeline scale its platform, accelerate product innovation and build out its workforce, Treeline co-founder and CEO Peter Doyle (pictured) told CRN in an interview.

MSPs have been, “at least from the Silicon Valley perspective, hiding in plain sight for a long time,” said Doyle. “We’re setting out to try to build what we perceive to be the modern or next-generation service provider model where we still have technicians, expertise, humans in the loop.

Treeline positions its AI tooling and agents as capable of augmenting or directly resolving 98 percent of customer-submitted requests and increasing employee on-boarding speed tenfold, from 20 minutes to two. Treeline can also reduce error rates by 95 percent for tickets solved within its platform.

Treeline’s AI approach helps human technicians save time on high-volume, time-consuming chores, such as password resets, on-boarding, off-boarding and other IT tasks, and instead focus on more complex tasks around strategic planning, security and working in highly regulated environments.

NetBox Labs Builds On Rapid Channel Momentum With Ahead Partnership

NetBox Labs, the commercial steward of open-source network and infrastructure management stack NetBox, this week announced a strategic partnership with solution provider heavyweight Ahead to help enterprises modernize network infrastructure.

Through the partnership, NetBox’s open-source infrastructure and network management platform will serve as the “foundation” for Ahead’s network automation services, supporting its cloud migration, security, and AI infrastructure offerings, Bill Lapcevic, NetBox Labs co-founder and CRO, told CRN.

“I think these large [systems integrators] tend to be our best partners,” Lapcevic said. “All of them have big practices that are delivering network infrastructure and all of them need to understand how to design, plan, manage and maintain the intended state throughout all of these projects.”

The widespread use of NetBox in various IT infrastructures has led to NetBox Labs’ rapid partner-fueled growth. Lapcevic said that 40 percent of the company’s growth is expected to come from partners over the next year. Right now, 30 percent to 35 percent of the pipeline is already sourced from partner opportunities.

Part of the company’s strategy has been to partner with more leading solution providers. In February, NetBox unveiled a strategic relationship with World Wide Technology.

To bolster these partnership efforts, the company has tripled its partner team in the last two months and is expanding into Europe and the Asia-Pacific region by establishing significant partnerships with other large solution providers and systems integrators in the regions.

Sophos’ Barlow Claims Channel Madness Crown With Decisive Win

And a big round of applause this week for Scott Barlow, chief evangelist and global head of community at cybersecurity provider Sophos, who was voted the winner of CRN’s 2026 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Barlow (pictured) won the final round of the tournament with a decisive 69 percent of the vote against CrowdStrike channel chief Michael Rogers, who ended with 31 percent.

“It feels amazing to win,” Barlow said. “And I appreciate it because of the audience that’s voting. There are partners, there are other vendors, distributors. It’s amazing to be recognized from both my peers and my partners.”

In this year’s tournament, Barlow’s path to the championship began with a victory over Everpure’s Hope Galley in Round 1. He then moved past SentinelOne’s Brian Lanigan, Veeam Software’s Kevin Rooney and Lenovo’s Wade McFarland in the next three rounds before besting Rogers in the final.

Barlow himself credits the cybersecurity vendor’s longstanding channel-first strategy.

“Sophos has been channel-first and channel-only for a long time,” he said. “I like to think this recognition reflects what we’re doing for partners. I’m just the voice of the channel internally and externally.”