General Compute Lands $100M Series A at $800M Valuation
The inference-chip cloud startup raised the round as CoreWeave's shares sit at a 12-month low and Elon Musk predicts neocloud consolidation.
General Compute, a startup that builds AI cloud capacity from inference chips made by Nvidia's rivals, has raised a $100 million Series A. Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures led the round, which values the company at $800 million post-money.
A May seed round valued it at $60 million. The new money was made possible by a deal with a large customer worth $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
CoreWeave, a listed neocloud that rents out computing power for AI, has seen its shares drop to a 12-month low. Elon Musk, who has $40 billion in debt for buying computing capacity, has predicted that "200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation."
CEO and co-founder Finn Puklowski is unfazed. He thinks Musk is talking his book to push down the price of the GPUs he wants to buy, and says fears of a chip-led collapse are "massively overstated." He added that Anthropic's S-1 filing is "settling fears for today."
Inference chips, not GPUs
General Compute focused on inference chips while others chased GPUs. It agreed a $400 million deal to buy chips from SambaNova, described as the first debt financing of inference chips. Positron and Cerebras are now also suppliers.
The company avoids building large data centers from scratch. It uses smaller power sources, rents space in other firms' data centers and converts former bitcoin-mining sites to run AI models.
Puklowski expects to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027. He suspects he will have access to 200 megawatts of power, "more than we can probably fund and get hardware for." Financing is not finished: "capital is going to be a full-time job for me, both on debt and equity," he told TechCrunch.
Its customers are cloud companies that sell fast inference to developers. General Compute supplies bare metal, meaning raw servers with no software on top.
James Palmer, a principal at Blackbird who co-led the round, pointed to his firm's investment in the inference cloud company Baseten. "Cerebras, Positron, SambaNova, all need distribution partners who can take them to scale, who can navigate the complexity of the physical world," he said.
SambaNova's CEO and co-founder, Rodrigo Liang, said: "Everyone in this market is selling speed. The real question is whether you can make money doing it."
Source: TechCrunch