General Compute, a new inference neocloud company, has raised $15 million in seed funding at a $60 million post-money valuation, led by FUSE VC. The company is leveraging SambaNova's new chips, which process 600 to 700 tokens per second, significantly faster than GPUs' 250 tokens per second. These chips, part of SambaNova's SN50 series, are designed specifically for inference tasks, offering more memory for context storage during calculations. General Compute has $300 million worth of these chips on order and plans to be the first neocloud to deploy them.
The chips' air-cooled design and lower power consumption allow them to be installed in existing data center facilities without requiring new infrastructure. The company is pursuing colocation deals with data center providers and crypto miners looking to repurpose their infrastructure. General Compute launched its cloud offering last week, claiming it is already the fastest at running MiniMax 2.7, a powerful open-source LLM. Source: techcrunch
