GoKawiilIn the increasingly competitive AI chip market, there's another startup in production that claims an advantage over Nvidia, the world's most valuable company.
D-Matrix, located three miles away from Nvidia's Silicon Valley headquarters, says its chips can run inference workloads 10 times faster and using five times less energy than a standalone graphics processing unit from the market leader — as long as the workloads are small.
The new inference chip, called Corsair, takes a novel approach to memory that's similar to Cerebras and Groq. With tech giants demanding all the computing resources they can get their hands on, it's becoming clear that there's substantial opportunity for smaller players to find their niche.
Cerebras, founded in 2015, held a blockbuster IPO last month, raising over $5.5 billion, and is now valued at over $50 billion. And Groq's assets were bought by Nvidia for $20 billion in December, making it the AI giant's largest purchase to date. Nvidia then released a new Groq chip at GTC in March, called a language processing unit.
"This is a $1 trillion market in the making," D-Matrix co-founder and CEO Sid Sheth told CNBC in an interview, adding that he has no intention of selling the company. "Can the market support yet another public company? Absolutely."
Founded in 2019, D-Matrix has raised around $500 million so far, putting it at around a $2 billion valuation. Microsoft was one of the investors, through its M12 venture arm. That's notable because of Microsoft's own chip ambitions, including its Maia 200 chip for AI inference, new PC processors built with Nvidia, and an in-house quantum computing chip announced last week.
Sheth won't name Corsair customers yet, but said he has commitments from high-profile hyperscalers, neoclouds and frontier AI labs eager to get their hands on as much compute as possible. D-Matrix begins shipping to those customers this month. About 90% of them are in the U.S., while overseas customers are in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Sheth said.