Exclusive: Positron raises $230M Series B to take on Nvidia’s AI chips
The investment comes from backers including the Qatar Investment Authority as demand for chips beyond Nvidia soars and as Qatar aims to build out its AI infrastructure.
Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The outfit plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a critical component for the chips used for AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The round, which brought Positron to a $1 billion valuation, was co-led by Arena Private Wealth, Jump Trading, and Unless, with strategic investment from Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has been increasingly focused on building out AI infrastructure, the sources said.
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 and most important customers, is reportedly unsatisfied with some of the firm’s latest AI chips and has been seeking alternatives since last year.
Meanwhile, Qatar, through QIA, has been accelerating a broader push into so-called “sovereign” AI infrastructure — a priority repeatedly underscored at Web Summit Qatar in Doha this week. Several sources told TechCrunch 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.
The strategy is already taking shape through major commitments, including a $20 billion AI infrastructure joint venture with Brookfield Asset Management that was announced in December.
Positron’s fundraise brings the three-year-old startup’s total capital raised to just over $300 million. The startup previously raised $75 million 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 — computing needed to run AI models for real-world applications — rather than training large language models, positioning the company well as demand surges for inference hardware as businesses increasingly shift focus from building large models to deploying them at scale.
With the funding, Positron aims to accelerate its roadmap to ship its next-generation Asimov silicon chip, targeting production in early 2027.
Sources tell TechCrunch 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.
This article has been updated to include updates from Positron about co-lead investors and valuation.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the date of QIA’s partnership with Brookfield.
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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
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