On February 11, Positron, a startup chip maker aiming to compete with Nvidia, announced that it had secured $23.5 million to expand production of its U.S.-made artificial intelligence chips.
Investors in this funding round included Valor Equity Partners, known for supporting Elon Musk's ventures, Atreides Management, Flume Ventures, and Resilience Reserve.
Based in Reno, Positron manufactures chips in Arizona that consume less than one-third of the power of Nvidia’s top-of-the-line H100 graphic processing units, while maintaining equivalent performance.
Positron’s chips are specifically designed for inference, the phase when an AI model is in use, rather than for training AI models. Though currently, there is greater demand for training chips, analysts forecast that the requirement for inference chips may surpass them as more AI applications are deployed.
Major players in Generative AI such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta have expressed their investments in AI infrastructure, with Meta planning to invest up to a certain amount this year, alongside Microsoft's committed $80 billion and OpenAI's recent announcement of a $500 billion investment.
Nvidia currently dominates about 80% of the market share, but escalating expenses and concerns about relying solely on one supplier have prompted companies like Microsoft, Meta, and others to explore internal or external alternatives.