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.
If you’re looking for comparisons, Norrsken VC is a $130 million impact VC that covers climate, while Demeter Partners last raised a €250 million fund focused on climate.
World Fund is also backed by pension funds including the UK Environment Agency Pension Fund, Wiltshire Pension Fund, and Croatia’s Erste Plavi.
World Fund has completed its raise during a war in Europe, interest rate rises, and jittery LPs.
In 2023 there was over $20 billion raised by European climate tech startups, almost matching the previous year, and bucking declining trends in other sectors, according to Dealroom.
The U.K., Sweden and Germany led for total climate tech VC in 2023 but Iceland, Lithuania and Bulgaria showed notable growth.
The Apple Watch gets some face time in the filing, as well.
The suit rightly notes that the Apple Watch is “only compatible with the iPhone” – a longstanding complaint among Android users interested in picking up what is far and away the market share leader.
Apple is not, however, alone in ensuring that certain functionality only operates as stated with first-party hardware, however.
The Apple Watch has historically been even more dominant in its respective category than the iPhone in the global market.
Should the DOJ’s suit force the company to open Apple Watch functionality, it would not only limit watch-based iPhone sales, it would also potentially open the device up to Android users, which, in turn, could have a positive impact on sales.
Chip giant Nvidia is hosting a massive AI conference as part of its GTC event this week, which kicks off Monday.
With a keynote planned from Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder, of the company best known in year’s past for its gaming hardware and today for its massive market share in the burgeoning AI hardware market, expect Nvidia to make some news.
Given how many AI startups and giants alike use Nvidia gear, TechCrunch is expecting quite a lot to shake loose over the next few days.
To presage the confab, and detail just why we’re paying such close attention to a single company’s industry event, hit play below.
Stick close to TechCrunch for coverage throughout the week.
Covariant is building ChatGPT for robots The UC Berkeley spinout says its new AI platform can help robots think more like peopleCovariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1).
“We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success.
“We do like a lot of the work that is happening in the more general purpose robot hardware space,” says Chen.
“ChatGPT for robots” isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’s a reasonable shorthand (especially in light of the founders’ connection to OpenAI).
Chen says the company expects the new RFM-1 platform will work with a “majority” of the hardware on which Covariant software is already deployed.
Catalan startup Showee, which is building smart showers with accessibility in mind, is one such company.
Here’s a video showing how it works:More than the hardware, Showee won awards and praise for the social impact it’s trying to make.
The company’s CTO, Eloi Mirambell, admitted that the smart shower’s price will have to go down before it has a real chance at B2C.
The startup says its shower uses 50% less water than a regular shower.
In its FAQ, the startup says that all shower units are sold out, but Showee will be available again starting April 2024.
The Federal Aviation Administration has concluded its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the second Starship launch in November, with the regulator saying Monday that it accepted the “root causes and 17 corrective actions” identified by the company.
While this means the investigation is now closed, SpaceX must implement all the corrective actions and apply for a modified launch license before it can fly Starship again.
When any rocket launch encounters catastrophic issues during flight, the FAA opens what’s known as a “mishap investigation” — that’s what’s happened here.
After the first test, the FAA directed SpaceX to complete 63 corrective actions.
“More Starships are ready to fly, putting flight hardware in a flight environment to learn as quickly as possible.
D-Orbit, an Italian startup that provides an array of logistics services for companies operating satellites and other services in space, has raised €100 million ($110 million) in a Series C round of equity funding.
The Milan-based company said another $50 million will be added to the Series C in the first half of this year.
D-Orbit today provides last-mile satellite delivery and related logistics services, mission control as a service to manage already-launched spacecraft and hardware, and space waste management services, all aimed at launches that are orbiting the Earth.
Others in the area of space services include Planet Labs, Privateer, Zenno Astronautics, Astroscale, and a variety of others just getting started.
“D-Orbit represents an excellence that in these years has positioned itself as a category leader in the in-orbit transportation segment globally, becoming the first B-Corp certified space company in the world.”
The affected divisions include voice-activated Google Assistant as part of the knowledge and information product team restructuring; and the Devices and Services PA (DSPA) team that manages Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware.
Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
The report also mentioned that Google will now have one core hardware engineering team instead of separate teams working on Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest.
Separately, the company has also let go of people working on the Google Assistant team, as reported by Semafor.
Last year, Google had rolling layoffs in different teams including the Waze mapping service in June, its recruiting team in September, and its news division in October.
