Tech companies’ capex problem is driving research and investment in new kinds of chips that aim to lower the cost and energy needs of data processing. That’s what newly launched chip company Great Sky is trying to do with an alternative framework to the widely used GPU, it told Semafor exclusively.
Its device — a superconducting optoelectronic network, or SOEN — uses light to communicate data, while GPUs use electrons. The startup claims it can process videos more than 1 million times faster than conventional models running on standard GPUs, with less energy.
“You can spend [a fraction of the cost], not have to co-locate with a nuclear power plant, put it in existing data centers, and use less power than a house,” said CEO Jeff Shainline, formerly a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The company raised $13 million — still a drop in the bucket in today’s fundraising ecosystem — led by San Francisco-based Bison Ventures, and plans to begin delivering chips later this year.
Great Sky and fellow upstart d-Matrix, which raised $275 million last year, are trying to chip away at big guns like Nvidia and AMD — a moonshot, but a much-needed one. Capex and energy needs are still the largest hurdles to AI’s success.