AI Inference

For a decade, Nvidia sold the world a simple story: GPUs are all you need. Training? GPUs. Inference? Also GPUs. That story built a $3 trillion empire. On March 16 at GTC 2026 in San Jose, Jensen Huang is expected to blow it up himself. Nvidia will reportedly unveil a dedicated inference processor — not a GPU — built on technology from Groq, the inference startup it absorbed in a $20 billion deal last December. OpenAI is lined up as the first major customer. And the implications for the entire AI hardware ecosystem are enormous. ...

What if instead of running an AI model on a chip, you turned the model into the chip? That’s the bet Taalas just went public with — and the numbers are making the entire semiconductor industry sit up straight. This 25-person startup out of Toronto emerged from stealth with $169 million in funding and a working product called the HC1: a chip that hard-wires a large language model directly into silicon transistors. No software stack. No HBM memory. No liquid cooling. Just raw, physics-level inference. ...