All posts tagged: AI chips

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

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

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 …