TAG
#chips
Stories connected through a shared idea, actor, technology or theme.
SiMa.ai raises $150 million to scale purpose-built physical-AI chipsThe round brings SiMa.ai’s total funding to $500 million and will fund its Palette Neat agentic environment and next-generation hardware. The company is targeting 1,000 dense TOPS for chips aimed at humanoid robots, drones, vehicles and industrial systems.→Huawei unveils Atlas 960 SuperPoD in challenge to NvidiaThe Atlas 960 SuperPoD is designed for AI training and inference and follows the Atlas 950 launch by only several months. Huawei also announced plans for Ascend 970 and 980 processors in 2028 and 2029.→MediaTek unveils a 2nm smartphone chip built for on-device agentsMediaTek announced the Dimensity 9600 Pro, a 2nm smartphone SoC with dual-NPU architecture and support for on-device applications using models up to 30 billion parameters. MediaTek claims 55% higher token generation per watt and a 40% reduction in always-on AI power consumption compared with the prior generation.→a16z raises $1.1 billion Machine Age fund for AI’s physical buildoutThe Machine Age Fund will invest across chips, memory, networking, power, cooling, data centres, edge devices and robots. The fund reflects a16z’s view that AI expansion increasingly depends on physical infrastructure beyond software and model development.→OpenAI publishes first benchmark results for Jalapeño inference chipOpenAI says Jalapeño delivered higher throughput, lower latency and better energy efficiency than comparison systems when serving GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1 and Kimi K2.5 1T. The results are vendor benchmarks for inference hardware, not training, and OpenAI says limited systems will be deployed this year.→Alibaba prices HK$80 billion share placement to fund full-stack AIAlibaba said the placement will support its global AI strategy and infrastructure expansion. The transaction gives a major Chinese technology company substantial fresh capital for the compute race.→Etched raises $700 million at a $21 billion valuation for specialised inference systemsEtched announced a $700 million round at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street, roughly doubling its reported valuation in a month. The company is building full inference systems around a specialised prefill chip and cluster-scale memory, claiming the systems can run frontier models.→