Stephen Huang had spent decades building chips in Silicon Valley when the launch of ChatGPT convinced him that the market was ready for the AI ​​chip company he had long considered building.

By then, Huang had worked on MediaTek GPUs, Apple’s. Face ID technology and a team of artificial intelligence chips from Amazon.

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022, Huang became convinced that the industry had reached a tipping point. “I felt like the market had arrived,” he said.

So, at age 55, Huang decided to start over.

In 2024, he founded Tranxform AI, a Taiwan-based AI chip startup that develops energy-efficient processors designed to run AI models outside of large data centers.

The company now employs about 40 people and is preparing its first chip, which Huang hopes will be ready next year.

The CEO is among a growing number of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities created by the rise of AI. However, unlike many founders who build companies around large language models, he spent decades designing chips before launching his own startup.

But Huang never considered age as a disadvantage.

“Morris Chang founded TSMC when he was 50 years old,” he said, referring to the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, who founded the world’s largest contract chipmaker at age 55.

In fact, Huang believes that age may be on their side, arguing that hardware startups often favor experience in a way that software startups don’t.

Semiconductor design is a long game, he said. Building a system on a chip (the embedded processor that powers devices ranging from smartphones to artificial intelligence systems) requires balancing countless trade-offs between hardware and software, a skill that can take decades to develop.

“To build a good SoC, you need experience,” Huang said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t know how to balance different operations.”

Huang’s initial adventure was not obvious.

Before founding Tranxform, he had a stable career and comfortable income in the United States. Building the company meant taking a significant risk and spending most of his time in Taiwan, a decision his family initially had a hard time accepting.

As Tranxform grew and reached key milestones, his family’s attitude changed. “Today they are proud of what we have achieved,” he said.

The timing also helped. Huang’s two children were adults when he founded the company. One works in the tech industry, while the other recently graduated from college.

“The fact that they have gone independent has made it easier for me to dedicate the time and energy necessary to build Tranxform,” he said.

Huang saying he He believed it was worth the risk because demand for specialized AI hardware would continue to grow as companies looked for faster, more energy-efficient ways to run increasingly complex models.

Huang’s optimism comes as investors pour fresh capital into AI hardware.

Venture funding for machine learning and artificial intelligence chip startups rose more than 70% to $16.2 billion in 2025 from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. However, the number of deals fell from 266 to 232 in the same period, as investors wrote increasingly larger checks to a smaller cohort of potential startups.

This year, funding totaled $9.9 billion as of June 22, with 87 deals, according to PitchBook.

Coming back home

While AI drew Huang toward entrepreneurship, the intensification of talent wars in Silicon Valley made him reconsider where to build his company.

His years in Silicon Valley taught him how difficult it was for startups to compete with tech giants like Google, Apple and Nvidia for engineering talent.

“We kept training people and they poached them,” he said.

Huang built his company in the Taiwanese chip hub of Hsinchu, where he believed he could assemble a more stable engineering team.

One of those recruits was his college classmate Way-Shing Lee, who joined Tranxform as chief technology officer last year after retiring from US chip giant Qualcomm.

Now, startup life has replaced the stability of Huang’s previous career with fundraising, recruiting, meeting clients, and constantly solving technical problems.

“Starting a company is very difficult,” Huang said. “You have to find business partners. You have to sell your story. You have to find financing.”

Huang said Tranxform is preparing for its next round of fundraising and declined to disclose details.

The company is still in the early licensing stages and generates little revenue, he said.

Still, Huang believes the biggest opportunities in AI are yet to come.

The AI ​​industry is “probably just getting started,” he said.