First of all, Provino Technologies is not an AI chip startup. There are already too many of those. But the secretive 40-member company, established in 2015 by Shailendra Desai, who had cut his teeth at PA Semi and Apple for system-on-chip (SoC) designs, is getting intense interest from a select few Fortune 500 companies because of his team's network-on-chip (NoC) IP. Although the potential number of IP licensees might not be huge, they are a few "large established chip companies" and those "newly getting into the semiconductor business," explained Desai. They have surprised Desai by considering ways to use Provino's scalable interconnect architecture for broader applications in -- you guessed it -- AI.