The round, led by imec.xpand and supported by a strong investor base including Eurazeo, XAnge, Vector Gestion and imec, will support Vertical Compute’s work to develop a vertical integrated memory and compute technology to help in the development of the next generation of AI applications
According to Vertical Compute, its technology will have a transformative impact bringing greater efficiency and privacy to next-generation applications. By minimising data movement and bringing large data closer to computation, the work being undertaken will ensure energy savings of up to 80%, according to the company, and help unlock hyper-personalised AI solutions, eliminating the need for remote data transfers, protecting user privacy.
“Memory technologies face limitations in both density and performance scaling, while processor performance continues to surge. The extreme data access requirements of AI workloads exacerbate this challenge, making it vital that we overcome the memory wall to enable the next wave of AI innovations. We believe going Vertical is the path to 100X gains”, said Sébastien Couet, CTO of Vertical Compute.
The rapid advancements in large language models and generative AI are transforming virtually all industries, however, these large-scale AI models still rely heavily on complex cloud infrastructure and high bandwidth memories, leading to data transfer latency, high energy consumption and sending sensitive data to distant servers.
Edge computing can address these issues, but inferencing large AI models on smartphones, PCs or smart home devices faces significant cost, power and scalability constraints.
The big underlying problem is the ‘memory wall’. Static Random Access Memory (SRAM), integrated as caches of the CPU or GPU, is fast but very small and expensive. Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM), the main memory of compute systems, is larger but expensive and energy-consuming.
The scaling of both memory technologies in density and performance is slowing down while processor speeds and market needs keep increasing, causing a significant bottleneck. This problem is rapidly escalating due to the surging demand for AI workloads, requiring vast amounts of data to be accessed quickly. Overcoming this memory wall is crucial for advancing AI inference
Vertical Compute is headquartered in Louvain-La-Neuve, with its main R&D offices in Leuven, Grenoble and Nice and is recruiting a team of engineers to support its ambitious R&D goals and accelerate the development and commercialisation of its chiplet-based technology.
“We want to recruit the very best from all over Europe and finally put Europe at the forefront in terms of tech,” explained Dubois.
"We are confident that, with the ongoing support of our teams and ecosystem, Vertical Compute can become a disruptor in the semiconductor industry. The strong international investor base shows that we are not alone in this belief”, said Patrick Vandenameele, co-Chief Operating Officer at imec.
