General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed a $400 million loan from Upper90, a tech investment firm. It might be the first deal to put up inference-specific chips as collateral — chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather than the more expensive chips used to build the models in the first place. The financing is the latest signal that markets are responding to concerns over the price of AI tools and tokens by turning to infrastructure that runs open source models more cheaply than the newest LLMs from frontier labs. Founded by CEO Finn Puklowski, General Compute raised a $15 million seed round in May to build an inference neocloud around silicon from SambaNova, an Intel-backed chipmaker. (Neoclouds are purpose-built for AI workloads, unlike the general-purpose infrastructure offered by traditional hyperscalers like AWS or Azure.) The company’s SN50 chips are designed for inference. They’re power-efficient and don’t require expensive water-cooling systems, which means they can be deployed more quickly than GPUs across a larger variety of data centers. …