ISAs are a technical spec at the foundation of every chip, describing how software controls the chip’s hardware.
In addition to building the chip, Rivos is working on self-contained data center hardware based on the Open Compute Project modular standard, which will effectively serve as plug-and-play chip housing.
Startups by the dozens, meanwhile, are angling for a slice of a custom data center chip market that could reach $10 billion this year and double by 2025.
Habana Labs, the Intel-owned AI chip company, laid off an estimated 10% of its workforce last year.
Kumar wouldn’t talk about customers, and Rivos’ chip isn’t anticipated to reach mass production until sometime next year.
Meta, hell-bent on catching up to rivals in the generative AI space, is spending billions on its own AI efforts.
But an even larger chunk is being spent developing hardware, specifically chips to run and train Meta’s AI models.
Meta unveiled the newest fruit of its chip dev efforts today, conspicuously a day after Intel announced its latest AI accelerator hardware.
Google this week made its fifth-generation custom chip for training AI models, TPU v5p, generally available to Google Cloud customers, and revealed its first dedicated chip for running models, Axion.
Amazon has several custom AI chip families under its belt.
Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet.
The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems.
Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files.
The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.
Microsoft did not say if it had reset or changed any of the exposed internal credentials.
Google Cloud on Tuesday joined AWS and Azure in announcing its first custom-built Arm processor, dubbed Axion.
Based on Arm’s Neoverse 2 designs, Google says its Axion instances offer 30% better performance than other Arm-based instances from competitors like AWS and Microsoft and up to 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than comparable X86-based instances.
To be fair, though, Microsoft only announced its Cobalt Arm chips late last year, too, and those chips aren’t yet available to customers, either.
In a press briefing ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Google stressed that since Axion is built on an open foundation, Google Cloud customers will be able to bring their existing Arm workloads to Google Cloud without any modifications.
“Through this collaboration, we’re accessing a broad ecosystem of cloud customers who have already deployed ARM-based workloads across hundreds of ISVs and open-source projects.”More later this year.
This grant, pegged for the company’s U.S. subsidiary, TSMC Arizona, is the latest step by the U.S. to strengthen its domestic supply of semiconductors as it seeks to reshore manufacturing of chips amid escalating geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.
The Act is primarily aimed at attracting manufacturing stateside, and also prohibits recipients of the funding from increasing their semiconductor manufacturing footprint in China.
With the new investment, Taiwan-based TSMC, which is the world’s largest producer of semiconductors, is broadening its plans for its fabrication plants in Arizona.
Intel could receive approximately $20 billion in grants and loans from the CHIPS and Science Act for its semiconductor manufacturing.
Meanwhile, Samsung, which announced a $17 billion additional investment in Taylor, Texas, is expected to receive more than $6 billion in grants for its chip facility in Texas.
Out of its base in Belgium, Robovision already serves customers in 45 countries, CEO Thomas Van den Driessche told TechCrunch in an interview.
The initial traction Robovision gained was in agtech, which represents 50% of its activities, Van den Driessche said.
But other verticals are growing faster for Robovision, Van den Driessche said.
According to Van den Driessche, Robovision is seeing strong traction in life sciences and tech.
Van den Driessche became Robovision’s CEO in 2022, and Berte moved his focus to fundraising, partnerships and global expansion.
SiMa.ai, named after Seema, the Hindi word for “boundary,” strives to leverage this shift by offering its edge AI SoC to organizations across industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture and healthcare sectors.
As the demand for GenAI is growing, SiMa.ai is set to introduce its second-generation ML SoC in the first quarter of 2025 with an emphasis on providing its customers with multimodal GenAI capability.
The new SoC will be an “evolutionary change” over its predecessor with “a few architectural tunings” over the existing ML chipset, Rangasayee said.
It would work as a single-edge platform for all AI across computer vision, transformers and multimodal GenAI, the startup said.
The second-generation chipset will be based on TSMC’s 6nm process technology and include Synopsys EV74 embedded vision processors for pre- and post-processing in computer vision applications.
Nvidia might be clouding the funding climate for AI chip startups, but Hailo is still fightingHello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, when we take a moment to dig into a raft of startup and venture capital news.
No big tech here!
Keep in mind that Y Combinator’s demo day kicks off today, so we’re going to be snowed-under in startup news the rest of the week.
Consider today’s show the calm before the storm.
Web browser company Opera announced today it will now allow users to download and use Large Language Models (LLMs) locally on their computer.
This feature is first rolling out to Opera One users who get developer stream updates and will allow users to select from over 150 models from more than 50 families.
The feature will be available to users as part of Opera’s AI Feature Drops Program to let users have early access to some of the AI features.
Notably, Opera is not doing any work to save storage while downloading a model.
“Opera has now for the first time ever provided access to a large selection of 3rd party local LLMs directly in the browser.
For years, the solar energy sector has grappled with interseasonal energy storage.
The claim is this tech does the storage more cost-effectively than any battery or liquid hydrogen solution on the market.
It enables hydrogen storage at densities approximately 50% greater than liquid hydrogen, presenting a significant advancement in hydrogen storage solutions.
A robust, reusable energy storage solution could bridge these timings, ensuring a stable energy supply when these renewable sources encounter unavoidable intermittent periods.
The firm certainly has investors’ attention: Photoncycle just raised $5.3 million (€5 million) to build its first few power storage devices in Denmark, which Photoncycle has chosen as its test market.
