The first AI chip backed loan turns to inference chips in a 400 million dollar deal

5:00 AM · July 17, 2026

General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed up to 400 million dollars in financing from Upper90, a technology focused investment firm, according to TechCrunch, in a deal that may be the first to put up inference specific chips as loan collateral. Inference chips are built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, distinct from the more expensive chips used to train those models in the first place, and General Compute is using the financing to build one of the world's largest inference neoclouds around silicon from SambaNova, an Intel backed chipmaker, with claims of delivering results up to 16 times faster than current general purpose GPUs. The financing begins at 100 million dollars and scales upward with customer demand, following a 15 million dollar seed round General Compute raised in May. Upper90 co-founder and chief executive Billy Libby, a former Goldman Sachs quantitative trader, has run this playbook before: in 2021 his firm financed GPU purchases by Crusoe, the energy focused data center startup, in what he considers the first loan structured against the value of advanced chips. The deal signals that lenders are increasingly comfortable extending credit against a narrower category of specialized AI chips, not just general purpose GPUs, as the inference side of the AI infrastructure market matures into its own distinct financing category.