Exclusive: Positron raises $230M Series B to take on Nvidia’s AI chips

Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The outfit plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. 

Investors in the round include Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been increasingly focused on building out AI infrastructure, the sources said.

The Reno-based startup’s Series B comes as hyperscalers and AI firms push to reduce their reliance on longstanding leader Nvidia. These firms include OpenAI, which, despite being one of Nvidia’s largest and most important customers, is reportedly unsatisfied with some of the firm’s latest AI chips and has been seeking alternatives since last year. 

Meanwhile, Qatar, through QIA, has been accelerating a broader push into so-called “sovereign” AI infrastructure – a priority repeatedly underscored at Web Summit Qatar in Doha this week. Several sources told TechCrunch the country views compute capacity as critical to staying competitive on the global economic stage, and is positioning itself as a leading AI services hub in the Middle East, fueling interest in startups like Positron.

The strategy is already taking shape through major commitments, including a $20 billion AI infrastructure joint venture with Brookfield Asset Management that was announced in September.

Positron’s fundraise brings the three-year-old startup’s total capital raised to just over $300 million. The startup previously raised $75 million last year from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Flume Ventures and Resilience Reserve. 

The company claims its first-generation chip, Atlas, manufactured in Arizona, can match the performance of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs for less than a third of the power. Positron is focused on inference – computing needed to run AI models for real-world applications – rather than training large language models, positioning the company as demand surges for inference hardware as businesses increasingly shift focus from building large models to deploying them at scale.

Sources tell TechCrunch that beyond its memory capabilities, Positron’s chips also perform strongly in high-frequency and video-processing workloads.

TechCrunch has reached out to Positron for more information.