ai-acceleration
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SkyeChip
SkyeChip is a Penang-based fabless semiconductor company that designs silicon intellectual property (IP) and custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Founded in 2019 by former Intel, Altera and Broadcom engineers, it specialises in advanced memory-interface IP (HBM3E, DDR5, LPDDR5/5x), UCIe die-to-die interconnect, network-on-chip fabrics and RISC-V CPU IP built on 6nm/7nm process nodes. Recognised as Malaysia's first homegrown AI chip designer, SkyeChip listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Market in May 2026 in the country's largest IPO in 16 years.
Etched
Etched is an American semiconductor startup building Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run only one thing: transformer models. By burning the transformer architecture directly into silicon, Etched claims an 8-chip Sohu server can match the throughput of 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Llama-70B inference. Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, the company has raised over $625M, including a recent $500M round at a reported $5B valuation.
Mitesh Agrawal
Mitesh Agrawal is the CEO of Positron AI, a Reno-based AI inference hardware startup that has raised $305M and achieved unicorn status in under 34 months. A co-founder and long-time COO of Lambda Labs - where he helped grow revenues from $500K to ~$500M - Agrawal brought his front-row view of GPU limitations to Positron, a company building purpose-built silicon (the Atlas system, and next-gen Asimov chip) that delivers 3x the performance of Nvidia GPUs at one-third the power. Backed by Arm, Qatar Investment Authority, Jump Trading, and others, Positron is building America's first at-scale AI inference silicon company.