General Compute raises $15 million to deploy specialized inference chips from SambaNova, positioning itself as an alternative to capacity-constrained Groq and Cerebras.

General Compute, an inference neocloud (a company renting AI processing power for running trained models), raised a $15 million seed round at a $60 million post-money valuation, led by FUSE VC with participation from Carya Venture Partners and Village Global Ventures.

The company is deploying SambaNova's new chips, which the chipmaker claims generate 600 to 700 tokens per second (versus about 250 tokens per second for GPUs) and are air-cooled and lower-power, allowing installation in existing data center facilities without new infrastructure. General Compute has $300 million of SambaNova's SN50 chips on order and says it will be the first neocloud deploying them.

General Compute launched its cloud offering last week and claims it is already the fastest at running MiniMax 2.7, a powerful opensource LLM. The company is pursuing colocation deals with data center providers and crypto miners to repurpose their infrastructure.