Components & Peripherals News
The 10 Hottest AI Chipmakers You Should Be Watching In 2021
Dylan Martin
Investors are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into AI chip startups that are developing new optimized architectures for training and inference while semiconductor giants Intel and Nvidia seek to protect their market-share dominance with expanding product portfolios.
Graphcore
Top Executive: Nigel Toon, CEO
Graphcore is taking on Nvidia with its intelligence processing unit chips, which it says are built from the ground up for the “fine-grained parallelism” and high memory capacity required by AI applications, unlike GPUs. The Bristol, U.K.-based chip startup is making a big sales push this year for its Colossus MK2 IPUs along with the M2000 systems and IPU-POD clusters that use the IPUs. The startup received a major boost for sales, marketing and research and development with a $222 million funding round it raised late last year, which brought its valuation to $2.77 billion. Most recently, the startup expanded its sales presence in North America with new and existing channel partners, including Trace3.
