Stealth Startup Kepler Emerges After 7 Years to Build AI Memory Beyond HBM, Eyes $245M US Support
npinto · x · 2026-09-11
Kepler, in stealth for 7 years, unveiled itself: a chip startup founded by ex-Intel FEINMAN center creator Sasi Manipatruni and memory/logic veterans, building a new AI memory class beyond HBM and SRAM — bandwidth-per-watt approaching SRAM with capacity beyond both, targeting high-throughput inference. Key facts: up to $245M in proposed US government support, a no-EUV path to leading-edge chips via 3D stacking and new materials, fabs already running with SRAM printing and HBM powered on, sampling by end-2026, production in 2027, and 2028-30 capacity reservations open. Covered in WIRED.
Related event: Kepler emerges after 7 years with EUV-free 3D-stacked AI memory(8 posts)→
More from Infra
- Carmack: Jetson Thor's 128GB at 273GB/s is over-provisioned for real-time robotics — ID_AA_Carmack · 2026-09-11
- YC Demo Day startup touts ultra-pure diamond wafers for data centers, $160M in LOIs — ycombinator · 2026-09-11
- S2-Attention: hardware-aware Triton kernels make sparse attention actually fast — burkov · 2026-09-11
- Together launches preemptible compute for GPU clusters at 50% of on-demand price — togethercompute · 2026-09-11
- New Model Hits Opus-Level Benchmarks at Wild Efficiency, RL Infra Details Emerge — nrehiew_ · 2026-09-11
- SageMaker prefix-aware routing cuts P50 TTFT by up to 77% via warm KV caches — AWS ML Blog · 2026-09-11