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Inference chips get a first financing deal
General Compute landed a $400M loan from Upper90 against inference-specific SambaNova chips, extending GPU-collateral lending to cheaper, purpose-built silicon.
General Compute, an inference-cloud startup built on Intel-backed SambaNova silicon, secured a $400 million loan from investment firm Upper90, reportedly the first financing deal to use inference-specific chips as collateral rather than the general-purpose GPUs used to train models. General Compute says its SN50 chips run 16 times faster than GPU-based clouds for inference.
sources 1 cited
1 techcrunch.com Why the first GPU financiers are turning to inference chips in a $400 million deal