It's only Tuesday and AI chip startups have already soaked up $1.1B in funding
The Register
February 25, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
AI chip startups have garnered significant attention as they secure substantial funding, with over $1.1 billion raised by Tuesday alone, reflecting the ongoing enthusiasm of venture capitalists despite concerns about an AI bubble. Among these, MatX emerged as a prominent recipient, securing $500 million in Series B funding led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP. The startup is developing the MatX One chip, designed to handle diverse tasks including pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference. Utilizing SRAM for speed and combining it with HBM for KV caches, MatX aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance by offering high throughput and efficiency.
In contrast, Axelera, a Dutch startup, secured $250 million to advance its low-power RISC-V based AI accelerators, targeting edge computing applications like computer vision and robotics. Their latest chip, Europa, achieves impressive performance at lower power consumption compared to Nvidia’s A100, positioning them as a potential competitor in both edge and datacenter environments.
These investments highlight the competitive landscape of AI chip development, with various strategies emerging to overcome limitations such as power consumption and memory constraints. While some companies focus on high-performance solutions for data
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Originally published on The Register on 2/25/2026