Extropic signs a $75 million Commerce Department LOI to scale thermodynamic AI chips
beffjezos · x · 2026-07-29
Extropic says it has signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $75 million in CHIPS R&D funding.
- The money is intended to scale the company’s thermodynamic sampling units (TSUs) for AI workloads.
- Extropic describes TSUs as a new semiconductor category that uses thermodynamic fluctuations in CMOS transistors to sample probability distributions.
- The company says the chips could improve energy efficiency by orders of magnitude on some generative-AI workloads.
- The announcement also emphasizes domestic manufacturing and an American foundry path.
Related event: Extropic Gets $75M LOI from US Commerce Dept for Thermodynamic Chip Line(5 posts)→
More from Infra
- NVIDIA launches RTX Spark for local AI on Windows PCs — ostrisai · 2026-10-16
- SkyRL ships Day-0 RL support for Beam with +62% LoRA decode throughput in vLLM — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- DFlash2 delivers up to 3.03x decode-only speedup for Beam across five benchmarks — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- vLLM's Beam serving kernels cut GB200 forward time from 8.15 to 6.47 ms at TP8 batch 128 — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- Reflection's 501B MoE Beam hits 463 tok/s on 8x GB200 with NVFP4 at day 0 — zhyncs42 · 2026-10-16
- Gemma 4 31B QAT on one 24GB card: 46 tok/s plain, ~80 with draft model on RTX 4090 — Subject_Poet_3861 · 2026-10-16