London-based British AI chip startup Fractile (founded in 2022) has completed a new funding round of $720 million, reaching a post-money valuation of $7 billion—a sharp rise from its previous round in May this year at around $1.1 billion—placing it among the UK's most valuable startups. Investors in this round include several well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Google's independent venture arm, and the UK government's sovereign AI fund. The company focuses on a novel semiconductor design that stacks custom memory and compute units on a single chip, targeting AI inference tasks and attempting to solve the industry's long-standing bottleneck of severe mismatch between growth in computing power and memory bandwidth. It claims it can increase AI inference response speed by 10 times, with Anthropic interested in becoming its first customer. Currently, many companies worldwide are developing AI-specific inference chips to rival Nvidia, making the sector highly competitive, and growth expectations for the AI sector have recently cooled somewhat. Fractile has not yet mass-produced chips, with its first product planned for launch next year, and its high valuation rests mainly on expectations of prototype products and hardware technology breakthroughs.