AI chip startup Etched announced $1 billion in contract orders for its "frontier inference clusters," systems designed to accelerate AI model inference. The company also revealed it has raised $800 million to date, including a $500 million round closed in December.
OpenAI has revealed Jalapeño, its first custom-built inference processor, created in partnership with Broadcom. Designed for OpenAI's AI models, it aims for better performance-per-watt than current alternatives and could reduce reliance on Nvidia GPUs.
AI inference company Baseten is reportedly close to securing a $1.5 billion funding round at a $13 billion valuation, a significant jump from its previous $5 billion valuation just five months ago. The round is described as split-priced, with some investors valuing the company at $13 billion and others at $11 billion.
Xiaomi achieves AI inference speed record with MiMo-V2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed, processing over 1,000 tokens per second on a single 8-GPU node, outperforming competitors with software innovations.
Chinese researchers, led by Huawei and multiple institutes, successfully conducted full-parameter post-training on a 1.6 trillion-parameter AI model using over 1,000 Huawei chips, enhancing China's AI self-reliance.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas announced a new hybrid local-server AI inference orchestrator at Computex 2026. The system automatically decides where to run AI tasks, balancing local processing for privacy with cloud power for complex computations, aiming for optimal "token value per watt."
Groq aims to raise $650 million from existing investors to expand its inference neocloud business, leveraging its AI chip and systems, following a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia.
AI company Anthropic is reportedly negotiating a deal to purchase specialized AI inference chips from the British startup Fractile.
