US concerns regarding Prosperity7’s agreement with Rain have sparked additional inquiries into Altman’s ambitions to expand the global supply of AI chips. Recent discussions with investors in the Middle East suggest he is seeking funds to establish a new chip company aimed at helping OpenAI and similar organizations reduce their dependence on Nvidia GPUs and specialized chips supplied by Google, Amazon, and a few smaller manufacturers, according to two anonymous sources familiar with the private negotiations.
Founded in 2017, Rain claims its brain-inspired NPUs will deliver up to 100 times more computing power and offer training with up to 10,000 times greater energy efficiency than GPUs, the standard graphics chips powering AI development for firms like OpenAI, primarily sourced from Nvidia.
Altman participated in one of Rain’s seed funding rounds in 2018, shortly before OpenAI committed to a $51 million investment in its chip technology. Currently, Rain employs around 40 staff members, including specialists in AI algorithm development and conventional chip design, as per the company’s disclosures.
Recently, it appears the startup has made a quiet change in leadership, now designating founding CEO Gordon Wilson as an executive adviser while promoting Passo from COO to CEO. Wilson confirmed his departure through a LinkedIn post, although he did not disclose the reasons for his exit. He expressed confidence in Rain’s potential to create a product that will redefine AI chip markets and significantly disrupt existing ones. He also stated he would continue to support the company in any way possible. Over 400 users on LinkedIn reacted to Wilson’s announcement, but Passo did not engage. Wilson declined to provide further comments for this piece.
The company aims to find a seasoned industry professional to permanently fill Wilson’s position, as indicated in an investor note from October.
Rain’s initial chips, based on the RISC-V open-source architecture backed by Google, Qualcomm, and other tech giants, target edge devices located away from data centers, such as smartphones, drones, vehicles, and robots. Rain’s goal is to develop a chip capable of both training machine learning algorithms and executing them once ready for deployment. Most current edge chip designs, such as those found in smartphones, are primarily focused on the inference stage. It remains unclear how OpenAI intends to utilize Rain’s chips.
At one point, Rain indicated to investors that it had engaged in advanced negotiations to supply systems to major companies like Google, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. While Microsoft has chosen not to comment, others have not responded to inquiries regarding the matter.
Last year, a funding round led by Prosperity7 increased Rain’s total financing to $33 million by April 2022, enough for operations through early 2025 and valuing the company at $90 million, excluding newly raised funds, as noted in investor disclosures. These documents referenced Altman’s personal investment and Rain’s letter of intent with OpenAI as key reasons for supporting the venture.
In a press release about last year’s fundraising, Altman praised the startup for successfully developing a prototype and expressed hopes that it “could vastly reduce the costs of creating powerful AI models and will hopefully one day help to enable true artificial general intelligence.”