Kneron, a U.S.-based semiconductor startup, said on Tuesday it raised a fresh round of funding as it looks to ramp up the commercialization of its artificial intelligence chips, which it hopes will rival Nvidia’s.
The company said it raised an additional $49 million, bringing its total round of funding to to $97 million.
Taiwanese giant Foxconn, the company that assembles Apple’s iPhones, and Alltek, a communications tech company, were among the investors in the round.
Kneron is looking to capitalize on massive investor interest in artificial intelligence and the chip technology that underpins it — underscored by Nvidia’s 180% rally this year and the initial public offering of semiconductor designer Arm in the U.S. last week.
Nvidia makes graphics processing units, or GPUs, which run in servers and data centers and can handle the massive computing power required to use huge amounts of data to train artificial intelligence systems. Many AI services today, such as ChatGPT, are run from the cloud.
In contrast, Kneron designs a chipset that goes into devices like consumer electronics and cars that allow AI on the “edge.” That means AI runs on a device rather than in the cloud. Advocates say this is better for security and speed as the AI application doesn’t need to come from the cloud.
Kneron calls its semiconductors neural processing units, or NPUs. Its latest product is called the KL730. This chip is designed for cars and the company says that it can be used to support autonomous driving.
Albert Liu, CEO of Kneron, told CNBC’s “Street Signs Europe” that GPUs are expensive to run which could help demand for its NPUs.
“So that will force people to switch into the more low cost (NPUs),” Liu said.
“With this tranche in funding, Kneron is specifically focused on expanding its efforts in enabling AI to make autonomous driving a reality,” Kneron said in a press release.
Kneron has no shortage of competitors from giants like Qualcomm and MediaTek — which are aiming for on-device AI with their chips — and startups developing AI semiconductors.
Foxconn’s semiconductor push
Kneron has managed to get some high-profile backers on board. Foxconn is one of the more interesting ones, given its push to diversify away from just assembling electronics like the iPhone into areas such as electric cars and semiconductors.
As part of Foxconn’s investment in Kneron, the two companies will “accelerate the deployment of advanced AI” for automotive and other areas. They will develop “an ultra-lightweight AI chip that operates” so-called generative pre-trained, or GPT, models from the cloud. GPT models underpin AI applications like ChatGPT.
But Foxconn’s foray into semiconductors so far has been rocky. Last year, it agreed with Indian metals-to-oil conglomerate Vedanta to set up a semiconductor and display production plant in India as part of a $19.5 billion joint venture. But Foxconn pulled out of that venture earlier this year, underscoring the difficulties of cracking the microchip market.
Manufacturing diversifcation
Kneron’s chips are manufactured by TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer.
However, TSMC and semiconductors more broadly have been caught in the geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China. There are continued fears that China could invade Taiwan, where TSMC is headquartered, which could cut the world off from supplies of the company’s semiconductors.
To mitigate the risk, Liu said that from next year, Kneron will have a more distributed production footprint in the U.S. and Europe “to de-risk.”
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell said Tuesday that while demand for computing power is “tremendous,” the production of artificial intelligence data centers will eventually top out.
“I’m sure at some point there’ll be too many of these things built, but we don’t see any signs of that,” Dell said on “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
The hardware maker’s server networking business grew 58% last year and was up 69% last quarter, Dell said. As large language models have evolved to more multimodal and multi-agent systems, the demand for AI processing power and capacity has continued to be strong.
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Dell’s AI servers are powered by Nvidia‘s Blackwell Ultra chips. The company then sells its devices to customers like cloud service provider CoreWeave and xAI, Elon Musk’s startup.
Dell shares rose over 3% Tuesday after increasing its expected long-term revenue and profit growth in an analyst meeting.
The computer maker raised its expected annual revenue growth to 7% to 9%, up from its previous target of 3% to 4%, with diluted earnings per share now expected to be 15% higher, up from its previous 8% target.
The company reported strong second-quarter earnings in August, and said it planned to ship $20 billion worth of AI servers in fiscal 2026. That is double what it sold last year.
The Motion Picture Association on Monday urged OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” against its new video creation model Sora 2, which is being used to produce content that it says is infringing on copyrighted media.
Following the Sora app’s rollout last week, users have been swarming the platform with AI-generated clips featuring characters from popular shows and brands.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” MPA CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clarified in a blog post that the company will give rightsholders “more granular control” over how their characters are used.
But Rivkin said that OpenAI “must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service,” and that “well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.”
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
Although OpenAI previously held an opt-out system, which placed the burden on studios to request that characters not appear on Sora, Altman’s follow-up blog post said the platform was changing to an opt-in model, suggesting that Sora would not allow the usage of copyrighted characters without permission.
However, Altman noted that the company may not be able to prevent all IP from being misused.
“There may be some edge cases of generations that get through that shouldn’t, and getting our stack to work well will take some iteration,” Altman wrote.
Copyright concerns have emerged as a major issue during the generative AI boom.
Disney and Universal sued AI image creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their films and disregarded requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Thoma Bravo co-founder Orlando Bravo said that valuations for artificial intelligence companies are “at a bubble,” comparing it to the dotcom era.
But one key difference in the market now, he said, is that large companies with “healthy balance sheets” are financing AI businesses.
Bravo’s private equity firm boasts more than $181 billion in assets under management as of June, and focuses on buying and selling enterprise tech companies, with a significant chunk of its portfolio invested in cybersecurity.
Bravo told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday that investors can’t value a $50 million annual recurring revenue company at $10 billion.
“That company is going to have to produce a billion dollars in free cash flow to double an investor’s money, ultimately,” he said. “Even if the product is right, even if the market’s right, that’s a tall order, managerially.”
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OpenAI recently finalized a secondary share sale that would value the ChatGPT-maker at $500 billion. The company is projected to make $13 billion in revenue for 2025.
Nvidia recently said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, in part, to help the ChatGPT maker lease its chips and build out supercomputing facilities in the coming years.
Other public companies have soared on AI promises, with Palantir’s market cap climbing to $437 billion, putting it among the 20 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., and AppLovin now worth $213 billion.
Even early-stage valuations are massive in AI, with Thinking Machines Lab notching a $12 billion valuation on a $2 billion seed round.
Despite the inflated numbers, Bravo emphasized that there’s a “big difference” between the dotcom collapse and the current landscape of AI.
“Now you have some really big companies and some big balance sheets and healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which is different than what happened roughly 25 years ago,” he said.