Nvidia’s $150M Investment Skyrockets AI Startup Baseten to $5B Valuation
Nvidia has invested a whopping $150 million in Baseten, an AI inference startup. This investment is part of a $300 million funding round that has catapulted the company’s valuation to an impressive $5 billion, more than doubling its previous valuation.
The funding round was co-led by Institutional Venture Partners and CapitalG, Google’s independent growth fund. Established in 2019, Baseten has carved a niche for itself in the realm of AI inference infrastructure. This technology enables companies to deploy and run machine learning models in production environments, thereby facilitating real-time predictions and decisions.
This investment underscores Nvidia’s aggressive foray into the AI inference market. This market segment is primarily concerned with running trained AI models at scale, rather than merely training them. Industry pundits point out that as AI transitions from the experimental phase to production deployment, inference economics—including latency, throughput, and cost per query—are emerging as crucial competitive determinants.
Nvidia’s investment in Baseten follows hot on the heels of its recent $20 billion acquisition of AI chip startup Groq. This move illustrates Nvidia’s strategy to reign supreme over both the hardware and software layers of the AI infrastructure stack. To date, Baseten has raised a total of $585 million and is poised to become the “AWS for inference.”
Source: Silicon Angle