Volantis raises $88 million for tech to connect AI, memory chips

San Francisco-based semiconductor startup Volantis on Thursday said it has raised $88 million in venture capital in an effort to solve a key challenge for AI chips by tapping a technology that is already sitting in hundreds of millions of iPhones.

The fundamental limit for AI chips from both Nvidia and rivals like Advanced Micro Devices is how well the computing parts of a chip can talk to the memory chips where an AI model lives and feeds data to the computing chip. Nvidia and AMD solve the problem by encircling their computing chips with expensive high-bandwidth memory chips.