Bill Gates’ VC Fund Leads $110 Million Funding for Chip Upstart - Bloomberg
Bill Gates’ VC fund, Microsoft Corp.’s investment arm and Saudi Arabia’s Aramco Ventures are investing $110 million in Neurophos Inc., a chip company that aims to develop a new technology capable of outperforming accelerators used to run AI models.
The funding round was led by Gates Frontier, the venture investment arm of Microsoft’s co-founder, the company told Bloomberg News. Microsoft’s venture unit, M12, also participated in the round along with Aramco Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil producer. Other investors included Bosch Ventures, Tectonic Ventures and Space Capital.
Austin-based Neurophos is developing what it calls an optical processing unit, or OPU. It’s a chip that’s made up of one million micron-scale optical processing elements that rely on photons or light to transmit data. The more conventional graphics processing unit, or GPU, used for training and running AI models relies on electrons, or simply electricity, to transmit data.
The market for chips that train and run AI models is dominated by Nvidia Corp., which has a market capitalization of more than $4 trillion. There are multiple companies chasing it, with technology pitched as better specifically for running the models as opposed to training them. Those include players like Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as well as Cerebras Systems Inc., which is in talks to raise fresh funds at a $22 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last week.
Neurophos claims its technology will provide 100 times more performance and energy efficiency than current leading chips.
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