back to article Startups bag billions to fill gaps left by chip world giants

Venture capitalists funneled billions into semiconductor startups in 2021, we're told, targeting designers of machine-learning technologies that fulfill specific or niche needs. PitchBook, a research firm that covers private equity and the financial markets, said this month it tracked 170 funding deals last year, and reckoned …

  1. Tom 7

    Wafer scale chip? Dont think thats new..

    Seem to remember it being tried in the 80s.

  2. hoola Silver badge

    The Next Big IPO Splurge

    Forgive me for being cynical, but currently we need chips manufactured out of the Far East to do useful things not develop all sorts of funky stuff that has no real use.

    Of course the VC crowd don't see money in that so through billions at this sort of things. At some point the entire VC/IPO thing has to come crashing down as the numbers now are so out of touch with reality. The issue is that when that happens it will make the dotcom bubble appear totally insignificant.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: The Next Big IPO Splurge

      Also, the bottleneck isn't chip design which has become refreshingly open and competitive over the last few years, but manufacturing. But you don't get many UV lithograph machines for the small change the VCs are handing out.

      Oh, and while the size of the market sounds impressive, margins are going down across the range.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "applications move to probabilistic computing models, in which processing and decision making is based on inferences drawn from large piles of data"

    Back when I was doing these things it never occurred to me to decide where to address an order based on inferences drawn from large piles of data. I took the simple route of dispatching it to the address given with the order. This might be wild supposition on my part but I think that's still how it's done today and that that's how business collects money from customers. That raises the question of what extra value is added to a business by making inference and whether that added value, if it exists, justifies the expense of making the inferences.

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