General Compute raises $15M to rent AI speed using SambaNova chips

In short: General Compute raised $15 million to build a service that rents AI processing power, using specialized SambaNova chips aimed at running AI models faster.

What happened

General Compute is a new company that sells “AI compute,” meaning it rents out the computer power needed to run AI models. It focuses on inference, which is the part where an AI model is already trained and is answering questions or doing tasks (like a calculator doing math, not a student learning math).

The company raised a $15 million seed round at a $60 million valuation after the funding. The round was led by FUSE VC, with participation from Carya Venture Partners and Village Global Ventures.

General Compute says it will rely on chips from SambaNova, a chipmaker backed by Intel. The company has $300 million worth of SambaNova’s SN50 chips on order and says it will be the first “neocloud” to deploy them, meaning a newer kind of cloud provider focused on AI workloads.

General Compute and SambaNova are betting that specialized chips for inference will matter more as AI use grows. General Compute says SambaNova’s upcoming chips could generate 600 to 700 tokens per second (tokens are the small chunks of text AI produces), compared with about 250 tokens per second for typical GPUs.

Why it matters

As more people and businesses use AI every day, speed and cost can become the deciding factors. General Compute also says SambaNova’s chips are air-cooled and use less power, so they can fit into many existing data centers without major remodeling, which could help the company expand faster.

Source: TechCrunch AI