Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

Startup Funding: Q4 2025


The promise of AI dominated the last quarter of 2025. Investors were eager to claim stakes in both brand-new startups and more established companies developing AI-specific hardware, primarily for data centers, with over $1 billion alone flowing into the sector. The largest round of the quarter went to a new entrant aiming to fundamentally change how AI compute is performed, while two in-memory ... » read more

Chip Industry Startup Funding: Q3 2025


The third quarter of 2025 was dominated by massive rounds for companies developing AI chips and quantum computers. Over $2.5 billion went to AI, with wafer-scale chip maker Cerebras leading the pack with a $1.1 billion raise. While several edge AI companies received backing, the quarter saw a marked shift towards solutions for the data center as firms seek to reduce the cost and power consumpti... » read more

Startup Funding: Q2 2025


Investors were drawn to a wide range of innovative approaches in Q2 2025, backing startups developing superconducting logic, chips for an emerging number format, big data processors, and novel power semi architectures. At the same time, photonics continues to draw investment dollars due to its ability to move data faster and with less energy at both the chip-to-chip and data center levels. T... » read more

Startup Funding: Q1 2025


The first quarter of 2025 saw six companies raise at least $100 million in investment. Of those, three went to quantum hardware companies, with major investment into neutral atom, superconducting, and hybrid quantum control approaches. AI chips and enabling technology were another big winner in the quarter, with companies developing optical communications tech for chips and data center infra... » read more

Startup Funding: Q4 2024


The fourth quarter of 2024 saw five mega-rounds of over $100 million. One of the hottest areas continues to be AI hardware, with one company developing RISC-V AI processor IP bringing in nearly $700 million in the largest round for a chip design startup this year. It was far from the only AI startup, however, as several companies gathered support for neuromorphic designs focused on ultra-low po... » read more

Startup Funding: Q2 2024


AI drew more investors to the chip industry in Q2. Four AI-focused chip startups receiving rounds of more than $100 million, targeting data center ASICs for transformers, highly flexible platforms for the embedded edge, dataflow processors, and mixed-signal neuromorphic chips. In-memory computing also helped boost AI, with three companies either incorporating it into their chips or providing sp... » read more

Blog Review: June 26


Cadence's Neelabh Singh examines the Gen4 link recovery mechanism in USB4 Version 2.0, an autonomous process that is initiated by a router when it encounters uncorrectable error events, and identified verification challenges. Synopsys' Gary Ruggles and Priyank Shukla highlight improvements to PCIe 7.0 that will enable secure data transfers and boost bandwidth for the next generation of AI an... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2024


The challenge of moving data from place to place is increasingly a key concern for chip and system designers, and investors are taking note. Numerous startups developing interconnect technologies received significant backing in March, with approaches spanning chiplet-enabling PHYs, photonic fabrics for disaggregated compute and memory, and telecom transceiver modules. Several new startups la... » read more

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