Microsoft-backed startup d-Matrix launches first AI chip

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) - Silicon Valley startup d-Matrix on Tuesday said it is shipping its first AI chip aimed at delivering services such as chatbots and video generators.

D-Matrix, which has raised more than $160 million in funding to date, including from Microsoft's venture capital arm, said early customers are testing sample chips, with full shipments expected to pick up next year.

The Santa Clara, California company did not name any specific customers, but said Super Micro Computer will sell servers that can hold d-Matrix chips.

D-Matrix aims to complement AI chip giants such as Nvidia, whose chips are used to train AI systems on huge amounts of data. Once the systems are trained, d-Matrix chips aim to handle huge numbers of requests from the end users of the systems, in a step called inference.

D-Matrix's chip is specifically designed to help handle requests from a lot of users at once on a single chip, even as those users continue to ask the AI system for new responses or tweaks to a video that they've asked the system to generate.

"We are getting a lot of interest in video use cases where we have customers coming and saying, 'Hey, look, we want to generate videos, and we want a collection of users, all interacting with their own respective video,'" said Sid Sheth, d-Martix's chief executive.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Michael Perry)