General Compute secured a $400 million loan from Upper90, with the financing structured around inference-specific chips. Reports indicate this transaction may be the first to use inference chips as collateral to support AI compute expansion.
Bet on reasoning compute power
The company was founded by CEO Finn Puklowski and recently completed a $15 million seed round in May. Its business centers on SambaNova’s SN50 chip, focusing on inference tasks for pre-trained models rather than the high-cost GPUs required for training.
The SN50 chip emphasizes energy efficiency and rapid deployment. General Compute states that these chips do not require expensive water-cooling systems and can be deployed faster across more data centers. The company claims its inference speed can reach 16 times that of GPU-based cloud solutions.
Upper90's previous experience
Billy Libby, co-founder and CEO of Upper90, said he provided financing for Crusoe’s GPU purchases as early as 2021. At the time, traditional lenders were more cautious about the depreciation risk of GPUs, making such transactions uncommon.
Subsequently, CoreWeave helped make chip collateral lending a common industry practice and advanced this model to the public market stage. Libby believes that GPUs are now more mature, and the market is shifting toward the next wave of computing assets, such as inference chips.
Mining power financing begins to diverge
The report also noted that open model platforms such as OpenRouter and Fireworks are securing new rounds of funding, while chip companies like Groq and Cerebras continue to attract attention. General Compute believes that demand for computing solutions outside the Nvidia ecosystem is rising.
Puklowski said this transaction is not just "a startup buying computing power with money," but rather capital beginning to reorganize around inference chips. As more alternatives emerge, computing power providers are becoming less dependent on Nvidia.