Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank Group, is reportedly planning to raise $100 billion for a new chip venture called Project Izanagi5. The project aims to rival Nvidia in the field of artificial intelligence processors, contributing to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Axelera is focusing on a niche within the AI chip market by designing AI-running chips and systems specifically for edge devices, such as applications in security, retail, automotive, and robotics. Their strategy involves delivering both chip hardware and software to manage and deploy AI models to these devices, aiming to provide high-performance and efficient solutions while balancing cost.
Axelera's AI hardware uses a unique architecture that combines the instruction set architecture (ISA) RISC-V and in-memory computing. RISC-V is an open, no-royalties-attached alternative to traditional chip architectures, while in-memory computing refers to running calculations in a system's RAM to reduce latency introduced by storage devices.