By Anna Tong
POSITRON, a startup flea manufacturer that aims to compete with NVIDIA, said on Tuesday that it had raised $ 23.5 million to scale the production of its artificial intelligence chips.
Valor Equity Partners, known to support Elon Musk companies, atreid management, Flume companies and the resilience reserve were among the investors who participated in the round.
POSITRON, based in Reno, says that its chips, which are manufactured in Arizona, use less than a third of the power of the high -end H100 graphics processing units of NVIDIA, while retaining the same performance.
Positron chips are intended for inference, the period when an AI model is used, rather than for the formation of AI models. Currently, demand is higher for flea training, but analysts have predicted that the need for inference chips could exceed them as more AI applications are deployed.
Manufacturers of generative AI models such as OpenAi, Google and Meta have said that they would invested massively in IA infrastructure.
Meta said it would spend up to $ 65 billion this year, while Microsoft said it would spend $ 80 billion. Openai announced a Stargate infrastructure program of $ 500 billion last month.
Currently, Nvidia chips have a market share of around 80%, but the cost increase and concerns about the operation of a single supplier have led customers such as Microsoft, Meta and Openai to explore internal alternatives or external.
(Report by Anna Tong in San Francisco; edition by Kate Mayberry)