AI Funding Spree: +$300m for Groq, +$676m for SambaNova

The growth of AI has seen a resurgence in venture capital funding for silicon start-ups. Designing AI silicon for machine learning, both for training and inference, has become hot property in Silicon Valley, especially as machine learning compute and memory requirements are coalesced into tangible targets for this silicon to go after. A number of these companies are already shipping high performance processors to customers, and are looking for further funding to help support customers, expand the customer base, and develop next generation products until profitability happens, or the company is acquired. The two latest funding rounds for AI silicon were announced in this past week.