By Max A. Cherney

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Startup Untether launched an artificial intelligence chip on Monday that aims to power AI applications in cars, agricultural devices and other extreme scenarios, the company said.

Flagship AI chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are designed to work inside linked data centers with thousands or even tens of thousands of others. Such installations require large amounts of power and additional equipment and are often geared toward creating or training large language models that power applications such as ChatGPT.

Toronto-based Untether said its chips are designed to run AI applications once a model is already built and can do so with a greater level of efficiency.

The market for chips that only run AI applications, also called “inference,” will eclipse the training market by 2027, Bob Beachler, Untether’s vice president of products, told Reuters in an interview. The company expects the inference market to reach $102 billion by 2027.

“That’s everywhere this inference is going to be deployed,” Beachler said.

Untether’s chip, called 240 Slim, offers substantial performance but with much less power, and is suitable for use inside autonomous vehicles, autonomous agricultural equipment and in some data centers.

Mercedes-Benz said it is working with Untether on its next-generation autonomous vehicles.

The chips manufactured by Untether were developed around open source RISC-V technology. RISC-V technology competes with designs made by Arm Holdings.

In a recent peer-reviewed benchmark from nonprofit MLCommons, Untether chips performed well when testing the applications the hardware is designed for.

(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Leslie Adler)