General Compute raises $100 million in Series A round — TechCrunch

Startup General Compute, which develops cloud infrastructure for running artificial intelligence models, has raised $100 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures, TechCrunch reports. Following the financing, the company’s post-money valuation for investors stands at $800 million, compared with a $60 million valuation after its seed round in May.

Betting on alternative chips

General Compute is building its cloud platform on specialized inference chips produced by Nvidia’s competitors. The company signed a $400 million deal to purchase new chips from SambaNova. According to TechCrunch, this was the first debt financing for the purchase of inference chips. General Compute’s list of suppliers also includes Positron and Cerebras.

The new round was preceded by a deal with a major client that provides for $100 million in annual recurring revenue. General Compute supplies “bare” servers — hardware without software — to cloud companies offering developers high-speed inference.

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Capacity without large data centers

Instead of the complex construction of large data centers from scratch, the company uses smaller power sources, leases space in other operators’ data centers, and repurposes former bitcoin mining sites to run AI models.

General Compute co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski expects the company to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027. By his estimate, the startup will have access to 200 megawatts of electricity — more than it will be able to finance and equip. Puklowski also noted that raising debt and equity financing will remain an ongoing task for him.