The chips powering AI can take years to design. This startup says AI did it in 2 weeks.

Architect Labs, a new startup founded last year, claims to have designed and verified a chip called Redwood in just two weeks using artificial intelligence. Co-founder and CEO Ebrahim Hussain, who is only 20 years old, says human chip architects set the overall plan while AI handled the detailed design work. This is a stark contrast to the usual timeline of a year or more and a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars for chip design, which typically requires large, specialized teams of around 100 people.

The startup recently raised $24 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures, with support from former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean and executives from OpenAI and Nvidia. Architect Labs' Redwood chip has been tested on reprogrammable hardware known as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), suggesting it could be more efficient than Nvidia's Jetson Orin Nano.

Hussain believes AI could revolutionize the chip industry, moving towards a "designless" era where custom chips become accessible without the need for large teams traditionally required. However, manufacturing the Redwood chip will be the ultimate test, and Hussain says Architect's AI system checks its own work for mistakes rather than relying on humans, to avoid costly errors during manufacturing.