British inference chip developer Fractile raises $720M in funding
Fractile Ltd., a British startup that develops artificial intelligence inference chips, has raised $720 million in funding. Reuters reported today that the Series C round was led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint. They were joined by about a dozen others including the U.K. Sovereign AI Fund, the British Business Bank and Alphabet […] The post British inference chip…
British artificial intelligence chip startup Fractile has secured $720 million in funding for its Series C round. The investment was led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint, with additional participation from the U.K. Sovereign AI Fund, the British Business Bank, and Alphabet Inc.'s CapitalG. Fractile's CEO is AI researcher Walter Goodwin.
The company predicts its chips will offer up to 100 times better performance and 90% lower energy consumption compared to current silicon. Fractile achieves these gains by eliminating the need for AI models to transfer data to off-chip high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Large language models process prompts through a multi-step workflow, often involving data movement to and from off-chip HBM memory.
This repeated data round-trip can significantly slow down inference. Fractile is not alone in addressing this bottleneck. Cerebras Systems, which went public in May, provides wafer-scale accelerators that reduce data movement by utilizing a large onboard cache. Fractile's approach differs, as it stacks standard dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) on top of its inference chips rather than integrating SRAM. This strategy minimizes data travel distance, enhancing speed and reducing energy consumption.
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