Overview
Zettascale designs specialized AI hardware called XPUs that aim to run AI workloads far more energy-efficiently than traditional GPUs. The architecture is built to minimize data movement, the dominant energy cost in AI compute, and the team claims efficiency gains many times greater than Nvidia H100 GPUs. Its first prototype, Grasshopper, is built on FPGA technology, and an in-development cluster system, Monolith, connects multiple XPUs into a single machine for training, simulation, and verification.
Company
The company went through Y Combinator's S24 batch as Exa Laboratories and was a standout on YC's S24 Demo Day, later rebranding to Zettascale. It was co-founded by Elias Almqvist (CEO), a self-taught engineer who studied at Chalmers University of Technology, and Prithvi Raj (CTO), who holds an MEng from Cambridge. Based in San Francisco, Zettascale is backed by Y Combinator, Soma Capital, and Olive Tree Capital, positioning its chips for discovery-focused AI rather than pure language-model scaling.