Private AI chip companies, by latest reported valuation

Etched builds Sohu, an ASIC that hard-wires the transformer architecture into silicon, trading a GPU's flexibility for speed and efficiency on transformer-based models. It now says its systems can run any frontier model, including mixture-of-experts designs (DeepSeek, Qwen) and non-transformer ones (Mamba), pushing back on the view that the chip is locked to one architecture. Its valuation rose roughly fourfold across 2026, from about $5 billion in December to $10.3 billion in July and $21 billion in a $700 million round led by Jane Street, which led after running one of Etched's racks in its own datacenter. The main risk is concentration: silicon optimized for today's dominant architectures has less room to adapt if they are displaced.

SambaNova sells whole systems rather than merchant chips: its reconfigurable dataflow processor (RDU) runs inside turnkey racks for enterprises and governments that want frontier-scale inference behind their own firewall. After cutting staff and shifting from training to inference, it was reported in late 2025 as an Intel acquisition target at about $1.6 billion. Instead it deepened the Intel relationship into a Xeon-plus-RDU inference design and raised a $1 billion Series F at an $11 billion valuation, a large step up from that acquisition mark.

Positron's case is power. The company says its Atlas accelerator matches or beats an Nvidia H200 on inference at about a third of the power, a figure without a published test method, and power is an increasingly binding limit on what a data centre can run. Investors more than quadrupled its value in seven months: about $1 billion with a $230 million Series B in February 2026, then $5 billion with an $875 million Series C on 10 September, co-led by NEA, Atreides, Valor, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark, with Cisco, Hudson River Trading, Naver and the Qatar Investment Authority also in. Much of that bet rides on Asimov, its next chip, due to tape out on TSMC's N3P process at the end of 2026 and to reach production in the second half of 2027.

A valuation built on a founder and an idea. Naveen Rao started Nervana, which Intel bought, and MosaicML, which Databricks bought; now he's building analog, brain inspired AI hardware instead of another digital accelerator. A $475 million seed round at $4.5 billion in December 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed with Lux, DCVC and Jeff Bezos, was the first part of a raise that could reach $1 billion. There's no product chip and no revenue yet.

Groq's Language Processing Unit (LPU) is built for deterministic low-latency inference, which through 2025 drove its valuation to $6.9 billion alongside a global data-center build-out. In December 2025 Nvidia struck a roughly $20 billion non-exclusive licensing deal and hired founder Jonathan Ross and other staff; Groq then raised $650 million to re-staff and refocused on running an inference cloud. A $350 million round in August 2026 valued it at $3.5 billion, about half its 2025 peak, with planned participation from Nvidia. Groq now operates 13 data centers and says its cloud combines Nvidia's LPX platform with its own technology, so the question is less rival-versus-incumbent than how a neocloud running significant Nvidia silicon sets itself apart.

Tenstorrent sells the open alternative to Nvidia's stack: RISC-V CPUs paired with its own AI cores, under Jim Keller, offered as chips or as designs other companies license. The figure shown is the oldest on this list and almost certainly too low. It comes from the December 2024 Series D (a $2 billion pre money valuation plus the $693 million raised). Since then, a filing with the US SEC on 9 September 2026 shows $1.29 billion more sold to 134 investors from 26 August, out of a $1.42 billion offering, with no price stated. Intel and Qualcomm were both reported in 2026 to be interested in buying it; Keller played that down.

South Korea is backing Rebellions as its own answer to Nvidia: Samsung and major domestic institutions are investors, and its chips go into sovereign AI projects such as its partnership with SK Telecom and Arm. Its value went from $1.4 billion at a $250 million Series C in late 2025 to about $2.34 billion (3.4 trillion won) in a $400 million pre IPO round in March 2026. The chief executive now targets a Seoul listing in the first half of 2027, most likely on KOSPI. In August 2026 Nvidia was reported to be in early talks with the company.

d-Matrix bets that inference is limited by memory bandwidth rather than raw math, building digital in-memory compute into its Corsair cards and extending it with JetStream I/O accelerators. A $275 million Series C in November 2025 valued it at $2 billion. It positions as a full stack beside the incumbents: its accelerators run alongside Nvidia GPUs in Parasail's inference cloud, and it acquired deployment-software firm Wallaroo.ai.

Tensordyne (formerly Recogni) builds the Napier inference chip and rack-scale systems around a logarithmic number system, its "Pareto" math, aimed at higher tokens-per-watt. It has raised about $209 million to date (most recently a $100 million Series C in February 2024), with a Series D in preparation. The roughly $1 billion shown is the company's own estimate rather than a priced round, so it is the least comparable figure on this list.

FuriosaAI, based in South Korea, makes the RNGD chip for efficient inference on large models. It reportedly turned down an $800 million acquisition by Meta in 2025 to stay independent and won LG AI Research as a customer for its EXAONE models. It has been raising a roughly $500 million round ahead of a planned IPO; its last clearly closed valuation is near $735 million (July 2025).