Positron Valued at $5B in 7 Months, Betting AI Inference Chips Don't Need HBM
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-09-14
AI inference chip startup Positron raised $875M at a $5B post-money valuation — 5x its prior round just 7 months earlier — led by NEA and Jim Clark, with Qatar Investment Authority, Cisco Investments and SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel participating. Its core thesis: the real bottleneck in LLM inference is memory bandwidth, not compute. Its next-gen Asimov chip ditches expensive HBM for commodity LPDDR5X, using a systolic-array architecture with local memory per compute block that it claims achieves >90% memory bandwidth utilization (vs 10–30% for typical GPUs), up to 2.3TB memory per chip for million-token contexts. Simulations show up to 26x GB300 NVL72 in tokens per dollar — but Asimov hasn't taped out yet (planned late 2026, production H2 2027).
The team is operator-heavy: CTO Thomas Sohmers (Thiel Fellow, ex-Lambda/Groq) and a CEO who scaled Lambda's GPU cloud past $500M ARR. The current Atlas product (still HBM-based) runs on 50+ racks at Oracle Cloud. The piece also compares Groq, Etched, SambaNova and Cerebras, arguing they all bet that inference costs will eventually exceed training costs, and that tokens-per-dollar will replace peak FLOPS as the metric that matters.
More from Venture
- Community operator shares 80%+ renewal rates and members' $50k/month milestones — gefei55 · 2026-10-30
- a16z partners: 10-20M people drive $150-200B in token spend, and AI workspaces will eat the browser — petergyang · 2026-10-30
- Reddit shares crash 26.12% in a single day, Polymarket reports — Polymarket · 2026-10-30
- AI short film Nexus ep 7 cost $28,775 to make, creator shares full breakdown — NightsRadiant · 2026-10-30
- China's STAR 50 down ~40% from July peak, erasing ~$480B as Unitree halves since IPO — sudoraohacker · 2026-10-30
- Nearly $1 Trillion Wiped From US Stocks at Open as AI Chip Stocks Lead Selloff — CurieuxExplorer · 2026-10-30