BARCELONA, Spain– Sapeon, a South Korean expert system chip start-up headquartered in California, is raising a financing round that puts its appraisal above $400 million, its CEO informed CNBC.
The start-up is backed by huge South Korean companies SK Telecom, memory-chip maker SK Hynix and SK Square, an investment firm spun off of SK Telecom.
Sapeon creates expert system semiconductors for information centers, for instance those run by cloud computing companies. These AI chips are needed for AI applications that need big quantities of information processing.
Currently, U.S. company Nvidia controls this market. But a variety of recognized gamers such as AMD and start-ups like Sapeon, are wanting to obstacle Nvidia.
“AI solutions will grow a lot thanks to the evolution of AI services like ChatGPT,” Soojung Ryu, CEO of Sapeon, informed CNBC in an interview at the Mobile World Congress that aired Wednesday.
ChatGPT is the viral chatbot established by OpenAI. It has actually triggered a stir in the tech world, with giants from Google to Chinese company Baidu rushing to launch their own competitors. Technology executives state ChatGPT has actually put AI applications on the map.
Analysts at Bernstein anticipate ChatGPT to be a multi-billion dollar advantage for chipmakers wanting to sustain these AI designs.
“We would like build this kind of system (AI chips) to have an opportunity for the business,” Ryu stated.
Sapeon was developed in 2016 inside SK Telecom, among South Korea’s most significant telecoms companies. SK Telecom then drew out the company in 2015 and raised outdoors financial investment.
Ryu stated the business is presently raising cash at an assessment of $400 million.
South Korean semiconductor companies consisting of Samsung and SK Hynix have actually normally been strong in memory chips that enter into gadgets like PCs. Sapeon is amongst among the very first companies out of South Korea to attempt and break the AI chip market.
Ryu stated that Sapeon is targeting the U.S. market which would pit it versusNvidia When asked if Sapeon can challenge Nvidia, Ryu responded to “yes.”
Currently, Sapeon has one chip on the marketplace called the X220 It is constructed on so-called 28- nanometer innovation. The nanometer figure describes the size of each private transistor on a chip. The smaller sized the transistor, the more of them can be loaded onto a single semiconductor. Typically, a decrease in nanometer size can yield more effective and effective chips.
Ryu stated the business will release a 7-nanometer AI chip this year and it will be made by TSMC, the world’s most significant agreement chipmaker. That would bring it closer to the existing innovation on the marketplace.
