Semiconductor startup Positron has secured 230 million dollars in Series B funding. The company plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Investors in the round include the Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been increasingly focused on building out AI infrastructure. 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 customers, is reportedly unsatisfied with some of the firm’s latest AI chips and has been seeking alternatives since last year.
Meanwhile, Qatar has been accelerating a broader push into so-called sovereign AI infrastructure. Several sources said 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. This strategy is already taking shape through major commitments, including a 20 billion dollar 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 dollars. The startup previously raised 75 million dollars 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, the computing needed to run AI models for real-world applications, rather than training large language models. This positions the company well as demand surges for inference hardware, with businesses increasingly shifting focus from building large models to deploying them at scale.
Sources say 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.