All posts tagged: AI chips

Why Wall Street wasn’t won over by Nvidia’s big conference

Why Wall Street wasn’t won over by Nvidia’s big conference

Published by skeptic

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took the stage for his annual GTC keynote on Monday, the $4-trillion-dollar company’s stock started to drop. Wall Street investors, it seems, were unmoved by the leather jacket-clad founder’s bullish 2.5-hour speech. Instead, they placed more weight on AI’s uncertain future and fears of a bubble. The nervousness felt by Wall Street couldn’t be more different than the buzzy atmosphere in Silicon Valley, where confidence, not uncertainty abounds. Huang talked for more than two hours about the company’s latest innovations, from new video game graphics tech and updated networking infrastructure to autonomous vehicle deals and a new chip designed with Groq to accelerate AI inference in the Vera Rubin system. He also threw out some eye-watering numbers about Nvidia’s business and beyond. Huang called the AI agent ecosystem a $35 trillion market and the physical AI and robotics industry a $50 trillion market. Huang also said he expects to see $1 trillion worth of purchase orders for the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin chips — just two of Nvidia’s many …

Another deep tech chip startup becomes a unicorn: Frore hits .64B

Another deep tech chip startup becomes a unicorn: Frore hits $1.64B

Published by skeptic

Eight-year-old semiconductor startup Frore Systems has raised a $143 million Series D, led by MVP Ventures, at $1.64 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. Frore has now raised $340 million total, the company said. Frore doesn’t make the chips themselves; it makes liquid-cooling systems for them. Founded by two former Qualcomm engineers, the company’s tech was initially created to offer air-cooling tech for phones and other small fanless electronics. The company’s focus on chips was inspired by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who received a demo of the technology about two years ago, Bloomberg reported. Huang suggested they develop liquid-cooling options, the new must-have for AI chips and systems. So they did, releasing products that work with various Nvidia chips and boards. The company has also developed products for Qualcomm and AMD. AI semiconductors have been a hot area for investment. Other new unicorns in the field include Nvidia competitor Positron, which hit a $1 billion valuation in February, and Recursive Intelligence, which landed a $4 billion valuation right out of the gate. Eridu just …

Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised 0M

Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M

Published by skeptic

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The company’s goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia’s GPUs.   Other investors in the round include Marvell Technology, NFDG, Spark Capital, and Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, the startup’s founder and CEO Reiner Pope announced Tuesday in a post on LinkedIn. Although the company didn’t release its latest valuation, Etched, MatX’s closest competitor, raised a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last month. Etched didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. MatX’s latest round comes more than a year after its Series A of about $100 million, which was led by Spark Capital. TechCrunch earlier reported that the 2024 round valued the startup at more than $300 million. Before co-founding MatX in 2023, Pope led AI software development for Google’s TPUs, the …

How Ricursive Intelligence raised 5M at a B valuation in 4 months

How Ricursive Intelligence raised $335M at a $4B valuation in 4 months

Published by skeptic

The co-founders of startup Ricursive Intelligence seemed destined to be co-founders. Anna Goldie, CEO, and Azalia Mirhoseini, CTO, are so well-known in the AI community that they were among those AI engineers who “got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us,” Goldie told TechCrunch, chuckling. (They didn’t take the offers.) The pair worked at Google Brain together and were early employees at Anthropic. They earned acclaim at Google by creating the Alpha Chip — an AI tool that could generate solid chip layouts in hours — a process that normally takes human designers a year or more. The tool helped design three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units. That pedigree explains why, just four months after launching Ricursive, they last month announced a $300 million Series A round at a $4 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, just a couple of months after raising a $35 million seed round led by Sequoia. Ricursive is building AI tools that design chips, not the chips themselves. That makes them fundamentally different from nearly every other …

Exclusive: Positron raises 0M Series B to take on Nvidia’s AI chips

Exclusive: Positron raises $230M Series B to take on Nvidia’s AI chips

Published by skeptic

Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The outfit plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.  Investors in the round include Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been increasingly focused on building out AI infrastructure, the sources said. The Reno-based startup’s Series B comes as hyperscalers and AI firms push to reduce their reliance on longstanding leader Nvidia. These firms include OpenAI, which, despite being one of Nvidia’s largest and most important customers, is reportedly unsatisfied with some of the firm’s latest AI chips and has been seeking alternatives since last year.  Meanwhile, Qatar, through QIA, has been accelerating a broader push into so-called “sovereign” AI infrastructure – a priority repeatedly underscored at Web Summit Qatar in Doha this week. Several sources told TechCrunch the country views compute capacity as critical to staying competitive on the global economic …

AMD unveils new AI PC processors for general use and gaming at CES

AMD unveils new AI PC processors for general use and gaming at CES

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AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su kicked off her keynote at CES 2026 with a message about what compute could deliver: AI for everyone. As part of that promise, AMD announced a new line of AI processors as the company thinks AI-powered personal computers are the way of the future. The semiconductor giant revealed AMD Ryzen AI 400 Series processor, its latest version of its AI-powered PC chips, at the yearly CES conference on Monday. The company says the latest version of its Ryzen processor series allows for 1.3x faster multitasking than its competitors and are 1.7x times faster at content creation. These new chips feature 12 CPU Cores, individual processing units inside a core processor, and 24 threads, independent streams of instruction This is an upgrade to the Ryzen AI 300 Series processor that was announced in 2024. AMD started producing the Ryzen processor series in 2017. Rahul Tikoo, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s client business, said AMD has expanded to over 250 AI PC platforms on the company’s recent press …