It's only Tuesday and AI chip startups have already soaked up $1.1B in funding

AI chip startups collectively walked away with more than a billion dollars of new capital on Tuesday, showing that venture capitalists are still excited about the opportunity to challenge Nvidia's dominance despite all the talk of an AI bubble.

MatX, which was founded in 2022 by Google engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, received the lion's share of the cash. The startup raked in $500 million in a series B funding round led by VC firms Jane Street and Situational Awareness LP.

The startup aims to put out its first chip, an LLM-optimized accelerator called the MatX One, later this year. While many AI startups like Groq, dMatrix, and SambaNova have prioritized inference, Matx says its chip will do it all: pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference prefill and decode.

Beyond this, concrete details on the chip remain thin. The company boasts the chip's split systolic array will ...