AI News · $100M+ rounds ·
General Compute raises $100 million Series A at an $800 million valuation
Neocloud startup General Compute raised a $100 million Series A led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, valuing it at $800 million post-money, up from $60 million after a May seed round. The company builds its cloud on specialized inference chips from Nvidia rivals rather than GPUs.
Key points
- Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures led the $100 million round at an $800 million valuation.
- General Compute signed a $400 million deal to buy inference chips from SambaNova.
- The company expects to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027.
What happened: General Compute, a neocloud startup, has raised a $100 million Series A led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, TechCrunch reported. The round values the company at $800 million post-money, up from $60 million after its seed round in May. A deal with a large customer worth $100 million in annual recurring revenue paved the way for the raise.
The details: Unlike most of the industry, General Compute builds its cloud on specialized inference chips from Nvidia rivals. It signed a $400 million deal to buy chips from SambaNova, described as the first debt financing of inference chips, and has added Positron and Cerebras as suppliers. Instead of building large data centers, it rents space in other companies' facilities, uses smaller power sources and converts former bitcoin-mining sites. It expects to deploy 75 megawatts of capacity in 2027 and to have access to 200 megawatts of power. Its main customers are cloud companies offering developers high-speed inference, to which it supplies bare-metal servers.
Background: The round arrives as CoreWeave's stock sits at a 12-month low and Elon Musk predicts consolidation among neoclouds. Co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski called fears of a chip-led collapse "massively overstated" and said he gets weekly calls from people seeking compute on any chip.
What to watch: Puklowski said raising capital will be "a full-time job for me, both on debt and equity," since the power available to the company exceeds what it can currently fund and equip.
Our take
More capital for non-GPU inference capacity could widen the supply of fast, lower-cost inference that AI tool vendors depend on.