TensorWave raises $43M capital to expand AMD-based AI cloud datacenter capacity.

TensorWave Inc., an artificial intelligence GPU cloud delivery platform offering an alternative to Nvidia Corp.'s market dominance using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. chips, has raised $43 million in a "simple agreement for future equity" investment round. The round was led by Nexus VP with participation from Maverick Capital, Translink Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, StartupNV and AMD Ventures. SAFE agreements, conceived in 2013 by Y Combinator, provide potential future equity in a company for the investor in exchange for immediate cash to the company. Founded in 2023, TensorWave sought to help solve key challenges in the AI and machine learning market by providing greater availability and optionality to GPUs for AI training and inference.

Currently, Nvidia is estimated to control between 70% and 95% of the chip market for training and deploying AI models. Speaking to SiliconANGLE, TensorWave Chief Executive Darrick Horton explained that before launching the company, even if people could get equivalent or better compute and capability compared with Nvidia cards, if it wasn't simpler or faster to implement, then they wouldn't want to switch. That's when his team took notice of AMD's Instinct MI300x series data center AI accelerators, released last year, which fit the bill.

Regarding AMD's chip capabilities, Horton noted that "The MI300 for context is, you know, around the same as the H100, sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. It depends on the workload." AMD intends to roll out the MI325X in the fourth quarter of this year. According to Horton, "The MI325 is going to be significantly better than the H200. So, it will have the most memory of any chip on the market and the most memory bandwidth of any chip on the market. It will dominate on inference workloads." The H100 and H200 are Nvidia's most powerful Tensor Core GPUs based on the Hopper architecture. AMD's chip offerings have been helping compete with Nvidia on price-performance ratios for TensorWave's cloud compute solution customers.

The funding will be used to scale up the company's primary data center with AMD Instinct accelerators to tackle AI workloads and to prepare its infrastructure for the next generation of AMD chips. TensorWave intends to add MI325X instances to its offering as early as the end of the year after AMD launches its new silicon. Additionally, the funding will help the company launch Manifest, a specialized AI deployment platform. Horton stated that "Manifest is a purpose-built, highly optimized inference stack for AMD that is accessible only at TensorWave," with the team "building in a lot of unique features that take advantage of AMD and offer solutions for actual enterprise use cases that are missing in the marketplace right now."

Manifest will support larger context windows—the amount of data that an AI system can ingest at a time—and offer lower response times. The platform will provide efficient analysis of complex documents for enterprise customers, provide accelerated reasoning, and offer a secure platform for private data storage. It will launch during the fourth quarter of 2024. The global AI market is projected to grow from $196.6 billion in 2023 to $1.81 trillion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, with much of this growth driven by the accelerating rate of AI research and innovation and the continuous expansion of AI product offerings and services across every industry, including large language models from companies such as OpenAI and Google LLC.