Is There Room for Start-ups in the Lucrative AI Chip Market?

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Competition in the AI chipset space is heating up; new players are looking to join the fray and they are raising impressive amounts of capital.

• New vendors face stiff competition from tech heavyweights such as Nvidia, hyper-scale cloud providers such as Google and Amazon, and well-funded Chinese organizations.

Just as the market for AI platforms is heating up, so is competition in the AI chipset space. And it isn’t only the large well-established competitors such as Nvidia, Google, and Huawei vying for market share. New players are looking to join the fray as well, and they are raising impressive amounts of capital. Untether, a Toronto-based chip manufacturing start-up, announced in early November that it had raised $20 million in series A funding. The one year old company plans to release a chip designed for AI inference using near-memory design, reducing the distance data must travel, thereby moving data to processors at 2.5 petabits per second, which improves overall processing efficiency. Across the pond, Graphcore, a UK-based organization, has raised a substantial $200 million to develop its Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), parallel processors designed for machine learning.