Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has invested in British AI chip startup Fractile.

Gelsinger, who ‘retired’ from Intel in December, announced the news on LinkedIn earlier this week (January 22). Financial details of the investment have not been disclosed.

Fractile was founded in 2022 by Dr. Walter Goodwin, a then PhD student at the University of Oxford’s Robotics Institute. Speaking to DCD late last year, Goodwin said that towards the end of his studies, he’d started to see the shift away from the training of AI models towards inference, but didn’t believe that existing hardware would be able to support inference at scale.

In order to combat this problem, Fractile has been developing chips that use in-memory compute, an approach that allows processors to run calculations directly in computer memory. Goodwin told DCD that by taking this approach, the company hopes to create hardware that reduces power consumption and improves performance, all while allowing for faster and less expensive inference at scale.

Fractile emerged from stealth in July 2024, having raised $15 million in seed funding from a round co-led by Kindred Capital, Nato Innovation Fund, Oxford Science Enterprises, and a number of angel investors. Entrepreneur Stan Boland, a former Arm and Acorn Computers executive, is also an investor and listed as a director on Companies House – a UK government register of businesses.

In his post, Gelsinger said that the approach adopted by Fractile resembled the ideas he was exploring in his graduate work at Stanford University.

The post continued: “Inference of frontier AI models is bottlenecked by hardware. Even before test-time compute scaling, cost and latency were huge challenges for large scale LLM deployments… To achieve our aspirations for AI, we will need radically faster, cheaper, and much lower power inference.”

In addition to investing in the company, Gelsinger said he was also looking forward to “advising the Fractile team as they tackle this vital challenge.”

You can read the full DCD interview with Dr. Walter Goodwin here or in issue 55 of the magazine.