Mythic snags $40 million to advance AI chips

Mythic announced today that it has closed a $40 million round of investment led by SoftBank Ventures to help bring a high-speed, low-power AI chip to market. The company will use this massive infusion of cash to help launch its specialized silicon next year, roughly seven years after the company was first incubated at the Michigan Integrated Circuits Lab. Mythic's technology performs machine learning inference calculations using analog electrical signals and flash memory, which the company says allows for higher performance and a lower-power draw than more conventional techniques, like using GPUs. Mythic is targeting one of the biggest bottlenecks in machine learning computation: moving data to and from memory for processing. Because all of the neural network inference computation takes place on the same silicon that stores its weights, it's supposed to work faster.