Kneron, a U.S. semiconductor startup, announced on Tuesday that it has secured another round of funding, seeking to expedite the commercialization of its artificial intelligence (AI) chips, with hopes of competing with Nvidia.

The company revealed that it has raised an additional $49 million, bringing the total funding for this round to $97 million.

Among the investors in this funding round were Taiwanese giant Foxconn, which assembles iPhones for Apple, and Alltek, a company specializing in communication technology.

Kneron aims to capitalize on the massive investor interest in AI and the chip technology that powers it, confirmed by Nvidia’s stock surge of 180% this year and the recent entry of Arm, a chip designer, into the U.S. stock market.

Nvidia manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs) that run on servers and data centers, capable of handling the immense computational power required for training artificial intelligence systems using vast amounts of data.

Many AI services, such as ChatGPT, operate from the cloud today.

In contrast, Kneron designs chips used in devices like consumer electronics and automobiles, enabling AI processing at the “edge.”

This means that artificial intelligence runs on the device itself, not in the cloud. Advocates argue that this approach is better for security and speed, as AI applications don’t need to rely on cloud-based sources.

Source: CNBC.com