Untether AI, a startup developing custom-built chips for AI inferencing workloads, today announced it has raised $125 million from Tracker Capital Management and Intel Capital. The round, which was oversubscribed and included participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Radical Ventures, will be used to support customer expansion.
Increased use of AI — along with the technology’s hardware requirements — poses a challenge for traditional datacenter compute architectures. Untether is among the companies proposing at-memory or near-memory computation as a solution. Essentially, this type of hardware builds memory and logic into an integrated circuit package. In a “2.5D” near-memory compute architecture, processor dies are stacked atop an interposer that links the components and the board, incorporating high-speed memory to bolster chip bandwidth.
Founded in 2018 by CTO Martin Snelgrove, Darrick Wiebe, and Raymond Chik, Untether says it continues to make progress toward mass-producing its RunA1200 chip, which boasts efficiency with computational robustness. Snelgrove and Wiebe claim that data in their architecture moves up to 1000 times faster than is typical, which would be a boon for machine learning, where datasets are frequently dozens or hundreds of gigabytes in size.
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