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AI Chip Startup Positron Raises $23.5 Million to Challenge Nvidia

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Positron, a startup aiming to rival Nvidia in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $23.5 million in a seed funding round. Investors in the round included Valor Equity Partners, known for its support of Elon Musk’s ventures, along with Atreides Management, Flume Ventures, and Resilience Reserve.

Focus on Efficiency and Inference:

Positron’s chips are manufactured in Arizona and are designed to use less than a third of the power of Nvidia’s leading H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) while offering similar performance. The company’s chips are specifically intended for AI inference, the phase where AI models are utilized, as opposed to training the models. Although demand currently leans toward training chips, analysts forecast that the need for inference chips will rise as more AI applications are developed.

Industry Shift and Rising Costs:

With major players like OpenAI, Google, and Meta investing heavily in AI infrastructure, the demand for chips is expected to grow significantly. Meta, for example, has pledged to spend up to $65 billion this year, while Microsoft plans to invest $80 billion. OpenAI also announced a $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project. Despite Nvidia’s dominance, holding around 80% of the market, rising costs and concerns about over-reliance on a single supplier have pushed companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI to seek alternative solutions, both in-house and externally.

OpenAI Set to Finalize First Custom Chip Design This Year

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OpenAI is advancing toward its goal of reducing its reliance on Nvidia by finalizing the design of its first in-house artificial intelligence (AI) chip, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The company plans to send its first custom-designed chip for fabrication at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) in the coming months, marking a significant step toward mass production, which is expected to begin in 2026.

The process, referred to as “taping out,” involves sending the chip design to a factory for production. While the initial tape-out can cost tens of millions of dollars and take six months for completion, there’s no guarantee the first version of the chip will be successful. If issues arise, OpenAI would need to diagnose and repeat the tape-out process, which can delay production further.

OpenAI views this chip development as a strategic move to enhance its negotiating position with other chip suppliers. The company’s engineers plan to build upon this initial design, creating increasingly advanced processors with broader capabilities for future iterations. If the first tape-out is successful, OpenAI aims to test its custom AI chip as a potential alternative to Nvidia’s chips later this year.

OpenAI’s in-house team, led by Richard Ho, who joined from Google’s custom AI chip program, is collaborating with Broadcom to design the chip. Despite being a smaller team compared to those at tech giants like Google and Amazon, OpenAI’s chip development is progressing at a remarkable pace, outpacing the years-long efforts of other companies in the space.

Currently, Nvidia dominates the AI chip market with an 80% share, but the increasing costs and reliance on a single supplier have prompted major companies, including OpenAI, to explore alternatives. OpenAI’s custom chip is designed to train and run AI models and will initially be deployed on a limited scale. The chip will be manufactured using TSMC’s advanced 3-nanometer process technology and will feature systolic array architecture, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and extensive networking capabilities—similar to Nvidia’s chips.

While the first chip is expected to play a limited role within OpenAI’s infrastructure, the company plans to expand its AI chip program in the future. To match the scale of Google or Amazon’s AI chip programs, OpenAI would need to expand its engineering team significantly.

TSMC Revises First-Quarter Revenue Forecast Due to January Earthquake Impact

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s leading contract chipmaker, revised its first-quarter revenue outlook on Monday, indicating that it would be closer to the lower end of its guidance. This revision comes after the company reported an estimated $161 million loss from the earthquake that struck southern Taiwan in late January.

TSMC, which supplies major companies such as Apple and Nvidia, calculated the losses from the earthquake at approximately NT$5.3 billion ($161 million), accounting for insurance claims. Despite the financial setback, the company clarified that there was no structural damage to its production facilities, and operations have resumed as usual.

The earthquake resulted in the destruction of some semiconductor wafers, affecting production. However, TSMC is actively working to recover the lost output and confirmed that its full-year outlook remains unchanged. The revised first-quarter revenue forecast now expects to fall within the range of $25 billion to $25.8 billion, closer to the lower end of the initial estimate.