AI Startup Taalas Emerges from Stealth, Raises $50m for LLM Chips
AI chip startup Taalas has emerged from stealth to announce that it has raised $50 million over two funding rounds. The two rounds were led by Pierre Lamond and Quiet Capita, with the company planning to use the funds to expand its operations and development efforts.
Taalas is developing a platform for turning AI models into custom silicon, with the company claiming that its resulting so-called “Hardcore Models” are 1,000x more efficient than their software counterparts.
“Artificial intelligence is like electrical power - an essential good that will need to be made available to all,” said Ljubisa Bajic, Taalas CEO. “Commoditizing AI requires a 1,000x improvement in computational power and efficiency, a goal that is unattainable via the current incremental approaches.
The path forward is to realize that we should not be simulating intelligence on general purpose computers, but casting intelligence directly into silicon. Implementing deep learning models in silicon is the straightest path to sustainable AI.”
Taalas plans to unveil its first LLM chip in the third quarter of 2024, and is expected to make it available to customers in the first quarter of 2025.
Caption: AI chip startup Taalas emerges from stealth with $50m funding
The company was founded in August 2023 by Tenstorrent founder Ljubisa Bajic - a former architect at both AMD and Nvidia - alongside two of the company’s engineers, Drago Ignjatovic and Lejla Bajic.
Tenstorrent builds scalable artificial intelligence accelerators for both the cloud and Edge. In October 2022, Bajic job-swapped with the company’s CTO, Jim Keller, before stepping down from the company entirely in March the following year.
The AI chip market is heating up, with companies like Cloudflare extending server hardware lifespan to five years, and will save $20 million. Meanwhile, Actis-led consortium snaps up Telekom Srbija telco towers portfolio in Western Balkans.
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In the data center construction landscape, Spain’s Aire acquires Canary Islands telco Idecnet, and Episode Navigating the Middle Eastern construction landscape - what’s the trajectory for growth & design? is a must-listen.
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