All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Blaize, a company developing AI edge computing platforms for automotive, enterprise, and computer vision markets, today announced that it raised $71 million in series D funding led by Franklin Templeton and Temasek, with participation from Denso and other new and existing backers. The company says that the funds will be used to support its go-to-market and R&D efforts. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of edge computing, or computation and data storage that's located close to where it's needed. According to the Linux Foundation's State of the Edge report, digital health care, manufacturing, and retail businesses are particularly likely to expand their use of edge computing by 2028.

AI processing is changing the world order among CPU, GPU, and FPGA companies, with a host of AI processor startups joining the fray. The fight was once mostly in data centers, but they've all had to decamp to a new battlefield at the network edge. Driven by that premise, Blaize, an AI processor startup in El Dorado Hills, Calif., is heading straight to the edge with its just-announced AI hardware and software. The market forces sending AI inference to the edge are well understood. Privacy concerns, bandwidth issues (going back and forth between edge to cloud), latency and cost worries drive AI processing more and more edgeward.