Abstract illustration of AI model architecture hard-wired into silicon

Taalas HC1: The Chip That Bakes AI Models Directly Into Silicon at 17,000 Tokens Per Second

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. ...

February 22, 2026 · 5 min · DBBS Tech