Extropic Aims to Disrupt the Data Center Bonanza

A startup hopes to challenge Nvidia, AMD, and Intel with a chip that wrangles probabilities rather than ones and zeros. Extropic claims its exotic new chip, called XTR-0, could be thousands of times more energy efficient than existing chips when scaled up. Extropic, a startup developing an exotic new kind of computer chip that handles probabilistic bits, has produced its first working hardware along with proof that more advanced systems will tackle useful tasks in artificial intelligence and scientific research. The startup's chips work in a fundamentally different way to chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and promise to be thousands of times more energy efficient when scaled up. With AI companies pouring billions of dollars into building datacenters, a completely new approach could offer a far less costly alternative to vast arrays of conventional chips.