Why early GPU financiers are turning to inference chips in a $400 million deal | TechCrunch0

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• July 17, 2026

General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, secured a $400 million loan from Upper90, a technology investment firm. It could be the first deal to offer inference-specific chips as collateral: chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather than the more expensive chips used to build the models in the first