Exclusive: Positron raises $230 million Series B to acquire Nvidia’s AI chips.

Semiconductor startup Positron has secured $230 million in Series B funding, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The company plans to use the capital to speed up deployment of its high-speed memory chips, a key component of chips used in AI workloads, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Investors in this round include the country’s sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which is increasingly focused on building AI infrastructure, the people said.

The Reno-based startup’s Series B launch comes as hyperscalers and AI companies seek to reduce their dependence on longtime leader Nvidia. These companies include OpenAI, which, despite being one of Nvidia’s largest and most important customers, is dissatisfied with some of the company’s latest AI chips and has been looking for alternatives since last year.

Meanwhile, Qatar has been accelerating its broader push for so-called “sovereign” AI infrastructure through the QIA, a priority repeatedly emphasized at the Qatar Web Summit in Doha this week. The country views computing capacity as critical to remaining competitive on the global economic stage, several sources told TechCrunch, and is positioning itself as a leading AI services hub in the Middle East, sparking interest in startups like Positron.

This strategy is already taking shape with key commitments, including a $20 billion AI infrastructure joint venture with Brookfield Asset Management announced last September.

Positron’s funding brings the three-year-old startup’s total capital to just over $300 million. The startup raised $75 million last year from investors including Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Flume Ventures and Resilience Reserve.

The company claims its first-generation chip, Atlas, manufactured in Arizona, can match the performance of Nvidia’s H100 GPU at less than a third of the power. Positron’s focus on inference—the compute needed to run AI models for real-world applications rather than training large-scale language models—positions the company at a time when demand for inference hardware is surging as companies increasingly shift their focus from building large-scale models to deploying them at scale.

According to sources, in addition to memory functions, Positron’s chips also deliver strong performance in high-frequency and video processing workloads.

TechCrunch has reached out to Positron for more information.