Chipmaker Positron nabs $875M to speed up inference with consumer-grade memory - SiliconANGLE

Chipmaker Positron nabs $875M to speed up inference with consumer-grade memory

Positron AI Inc., a developer of inference appliances that don’t include HBM memory, today announced that it has raised $875 million in funding.

NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Netscape Inc. co-founder Jim Clark led the round. They were joined by more than a dozen institutional investors. Positron is now worth $5 billion, a fivefold increase from February.

Large language models frequently move data between the computing and memory circuits of the underlying graphics cards. The speed at which they do so is measured by a metric called memory bandwidth. The higher a chip’s memory bandwidth, the faster it can perform inference.

Server-grade graphics cards ship with HBM memory, the RAM variety with the highest memory bandwidth on the market. The supply of HBM is currently well below demand. Furthermore, there’s a shortage of the interconnects that are used to integrate HBM memory with graphics’ cards computing circuits.