Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Sequence B funding, TechCrunch has completely realized. The outfit plans to make employ of the capital to stride up deployment of its high-elope memory chips, a severe part for the chips ragged for AI workloads, sources acquainted with the topic advised TechCrunch.
Merchants within the round encompass Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been an increasing number of pondering about building out AI infrastructure, the sources stated.
The Reno-basically based fully mostly startup’s Sequence B comes as hyperscalers and AI companies push to within the gash worth of their reliance on longstanding leader Nvidia. These companies encompass OpenAI, which, despite being one in every of Nvidia’s largest and most necessary potentialities, is reportedly abominable with among the firm’s most up-to-date AI chips and has been in quest of alternatives since last year.
In the meantime, Qatar, by means of QIA, has been accelerating a broader push into so-called “sovereign” AI infrastructure – a priority many instances underscored at Internet Summit Qatar in Doha this week. Loads of sources advised TechCrunch the country views compute capacity as severe to staying competitive on the world economic stage, and is positioning itself as a leading AI services hub within the Heart East, fueling passion in startups esteem Positron.
The intention is already taking shape by means of most important commitments, including a $20 billion AI infrastructure joint mission with Brookfield Asset Administration that became as soon as announced in September.
Positron’s fundraise brings the three-year-outmoded startup’s full capital raised to staunch over $300 million. The startup beforehand raised $75 million last year from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Administration, DFJ Bid, Flume Ventures and Resilience Reserve.
The corporate claims its first-generation chip, Atlas, manufactured in Arizona, can match the performance of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs for decrease than a third of the skill. Positron is pondering about inference – computing wished to lag AI models for right-world applications – in space of training gigantic language models, positioning the corporate as search files from surges for inference hardware as agencies an increasing number of shift focal point from building gigantic models to deploying them at scale.
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Sources expose TechCrunch that beyond its memory capabilities, Positron’s chips moreover produce strongly in high-frequency and video-processing workloads.
TechCrunch has reached out to Positron for extra files.
Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, coverage, and rising traits shaping synthetic intelligence. Her work has moreover appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Each day Beast, and other publications.
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