Positron AI is a US semiconductor company that designs specialized hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence inference, the compute required to run trained AI models in production. Unlike companies focused on model training, Positron targets the rapidly growing inference market where energy efficiency and cost-per-token are critical.
The company's first-generation chip, Atlas, is manufactured in Arizona. Positron claims Atlas can match the performance of Nvidia's H100 GPUs while consuming less than a third of the power, a strong claim in a market where data-center energy consumption has become a major constraint on AI deployment.
Positron was founded in 2023 by Thomas Sohmers, a computer architecture entrepreneur who previously founded REX Computing, and Edward Kmett, a computer scientist known for his work in functional programming and compiler design who serves as CTO. The team's emphasis on both silicon and software differentiates its inference-first approach.
The company secured a $51.6 million oversubscribed Series A in July 2025, followed by a $230 million Series B in February 2026 at a post-money valuation exceeding $1 billion, making it one of a growing number of AI chip unicorns. The Series B was co-led by ARENA Private Wealth, Jump Trading and Unless, with strategic investment from Arm, the Qatar Investment Authority and Helena.
With the new capital, Positron aims to accelerate its roadmap toward its next-generation Asimov chip, targeting production around early 2027. The company's combination of domestic manufacturing, energy-efficiency claims and a focus on inference positions it to compete for share as enterprises seek alternatives to Nvidia for serving AI models at scale.