AI chip startup MatX raises over $500 million, challenging Nvidia—Bloomberg reports

Investing.com - According to Bloomberg, AI chip startup MatX, founded by two former Google semiconductor engineers, has raised over $500 million in a new funding round to develop hardware products competing with Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA). The company states that its valuation has now reached several billion dollars but declined to disclose a specific figure.

Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment firm founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, led the funding round. Other supporters include Marvell Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL), venture capital firms NFDG and Spark Capital, as well as Stripe Inc. co-founders Patrick and John Collison.

MatX was founded by Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, with the former responsible for Google’s chip and AI model software development, and the latter a hardware engineer for Google’s tensor processing unit chips. The two left Google in 2022 with the goal of creating a chip focused on running large language models, which are fundamental to AI chatbots.

The startup aims to combine two very different chip manufacturing approaches, integrating Nvidia and Google’s high-bandwidth memory used for training AI models with other companies’ static random-access memory for faster inference processing. Pope said, “Our stance is that it’s actually possible to achieve both functions in the same product, resulting in a better overall product.”

MatX expects to complete the final chip design this year and hopes to begin shipping in 2027. The company plans to collaborate with TSMC for manufacturing, and the new funding is intended to reserve manufacturing capacity and components to ensure quick delivery once the product is ready.

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