nonbinding letter of intent with the Commerce Department

Extropic, an American company specializing in thermodynamic computing hardware, has signed a nonbinding letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce. The agreement could provide up to $75 million in funding through the Commerce Department's CHIPS Research and Development Office. This funding will be used to develop Thermodynamic Sampling Units (TSUs), a novel type of semiconductor designed specifically for probabilistic AI workloads.

TSUs harness the natural thermodynamic fluctuations of standard CMOS transistors to sample from programmable probability distributions, enabling power-efficient probabilistic inference and inference for physical intelligence and defense systems. The company's founder and CEO, Guillaume Verdon, emphasized the potential of TSUs in delivering more intelligence per watt compared to conventional GPUs.

The U.S. government is partnering with Extropic to manufacture this new category of compute on American soil, aiming to return the nation to compute dominance. This investment in thermodynamic computing will push the boundaries of intelligence per watt achievable from American silicon, potentially leading to orders of magnitude greater overall intelligence output.

By accelerating the development of TSUs, the U.S. can enhance its domestic capabilities, create high-paying jobs, and maintain its leading position in the global AI landscape.