Let's just shift gears a little bit, talk chips more broadly and how there's some new entrance into the AI part of the equation. Jeff Bezos, for example, and Samsung are betting big on AI chip startup ten Store, announcing a seven hundred million dollar investment, which puts the company now in a two point six billion dollar valuation. Joining us to discuss is the CEO of the company, Jim Keller,
who is himself a legend and chip making world. Of course, your resume includes know who's who of AMD, Apple, Tesla and indeed Intel. Jim, the money that you're raising, what is it that you're hoping to do. You're wanting to make a more cheaper operation and option out there for AI accelerator chips.
Yeah, that's right. We're building out the team, we're building out our products, We're starting to ship our products, and our real mission right now is to bring on developers and early customers.
Let's talk about the customers and what you offer that isn't in the market at the moment. Jim, what's your selling point?
Well, we have a couple of things. We license our IP and we're building a business on that for both risk vice CPU and AI. We're selling low cost development systems like I'm really interested in hitting a much lower cost point. And then we open source to our whole AI compiler stack and people like the transparency. They can see exactly what the technology is doing. They actually it's turned into a great recruiting vehicle for our software engineers.
Interesting. So let's just go first to the price points, a cheap offering. A lot of that's done by having less pricing components. For example, in videos, chips are incredibly expensive. We know people pay it because of what they offer the full stack in many ways, but they struggle from a choke perspective on how foundwidth memory chips in particular, you don't need them. Why don't you need them? Why don't you want them?
Well, it's partly about choices. So there's two choices. One is, if you pick a really expensive memory technology, you'll never get the price down right, and so you need to then make technology decisions to lower your costs. So we have a tensor process or architecture, we keep the data
on chip. More, we have a software stack that's very good at partitioning AI workloads across multiple chips, and then they can send information and compute packets to each other without having to go through memory, and that lowers the memory VANDTH required and also lets it scale more naturally across many chips.
So I'm a new investor. You brought me on board. I'm interested Bezos Samsung. But you're saying, look, I'm going to do this with more open architecture, with cheaper offerings. How much of the market shed do you have to get? What sort of price point are we looking at for your chip offering?
Yeah, so this is really wild. The market is so big, Like the percent we have to get is actually pretty small to be a real value proposition. You know, next year we'll die and go to heaven if we make two hundred million dollars. We have already booked one hundred and fifty million in revenue. I'm really interested in finding small players, early players, people who want to own their technology. People are excited about our software and hardware architecture, and
you know, I want to grow organically from there. I think some people will focus on the big guys first. That's not how new technology introductions go. You focus on smaller players, people who need a differentiation, and that's what we're really that's our mission.
So what therefore is the mission building in in terms of long term value of generative AI of AI applications. Do you think that we are in some sort of hype cycle? Do you think that actually this market is as big as manufacturing in.
Well, first of all, we are definitely in a hype cycle. There's going to be multiple and people say, well, Jim, you don't understand it's going to go down next year, and then it's going to go up, and it's going to down low pass filter all that stuff. Right, what's really going to happen is AI is going to dominate computing over the next ten years, and we're just starting and the hardware is going to change a lot. The
software is going to change a lot. Like one day you read in the papers lms can do anything, and the next day you read they've hit a limit. Ignore all that stuff. We're just starting this. There's going to be massive transformations. So what I really wanted tense Torrent to have is great computer designers, general purpose CPUs, AI processors, chip design, system design, software design. And then the open source stuff is really interesting because that engages a community.
People are really passionate about that to contribute back.
This is where you're thinking about your own talent team. You've managed talent, as we said, sort of across the board. You began like you were integral to the chip design process in the US, and you think back to DC and then the work that you then did an AMD, moving to Apple, you were at Intel, and I just have to go there on this day that Pat Gelsinger hands in his well, hands his hat on off, he's going to re resigning. Many would say it's because they
didn't get into AI quickly enough. That was prior to him. What do you make of the transition.
Well, it's hard to say. So. I like Pat personally. I've met him a number of times. He's a smart guy. He really cares. I think the market focuses too much on stuff like execution and AI transition. The way you make money, get customers to build great products, like Steve Jobs is the best at this, focus on the product, make the best product you possibly can. And I think they need somebody way more hands on, really focus on product, and they need to stop talking about AI execution all
the nonsense. Right when they make the best product, the best fab, the best chip, the best GP accelerator. They'll do fine.
Jim. When you're thinking about all of the errors, you want to own. How much does US and China factor into your growth story?
So, first of all, we are building open source software, risk five based technology. We think that's an open platform. There's a lot of people interested in that. At the same time, you know, there are you know, restrictions by the US government and trade rules. We have really good lawyers and trade compliance people. We work very closely with those those guys. We want to do the right thing both for the business and for you know, being compliant to what's going on. And it's a changing world and
we're very involved in that. Short run, our business possibilities are really big, and you know, if China plays in that, that'll be interesting. If it doesn't for you know, various reasons, that's fine.
Got a big evaluation come back when you're executing on the latest round. Thank you, Jim Keller of ted Stone. All right, great to have you.