CoreWeave是一家上市的新云公司，为AI出租算力，其股价已跌至12个月低点，而埃隆·马斯克正在动用400亿美元债务购买算力，并预测“200多家新云公司将面临鳗鱼级死亡与整合”。对于一家新云公司来说，宣布A轮融资并非理想时机。
CoreWeave, a publicly traded neocloud that rents out computing power for AI, has seen its stock price fall to a 12-month low, and Elon Musk is flexing $40 billion in debt for buying computing capacity and predicting that “200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation.”It’s not exactly the ideal week to announce a Series A for a neocloud.
General Compute联合创始人兼首席执行官芬·帕夫洛夫斯基对此不以为意。他看好CoreWeave的前景，认为马斯克只是在为自己说话，以压低他想购买的GPU价格。对芯片主导的崩溃的担忧“被大大夸大了。我每周都有人打电话给我，要求我提供TPU、GPU、任何芯片，以获取更多算力。”
General Compute co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski is unfazed. He’s bullish on CoreWeave’s chances, and thinks Musk is just talking his book to drive down the prices of the GPUs he wants to buy. Fears of a chip-led collapse are “massively overstated. I have people calling me up every single week asking me to do TPUs, GPUs, any chip, to get them more compute.”
同样重要的是，他说，Anthropic的乐观S-1“正在平息当下的担忧”。General Compute找到了一个利基市场，使用Nvidia竞争对手制造的专用推理芯片构建其云。该公司与SambaNova达成了4亿美元的新芯片采购协议——这是首笔推理芯片债务融资——并已将Positron和Cerebras加入其芯片供应商组合。
Just as important, he says, Anthropic’s bullish S-1 is “settling fears for today.”General Compute has found a niche building its cloud out of specialized inference chips built by Nvidia rivals. The company struck a $400 million deal to purchase new chips from SambaNova—the first debt financing of inference chips—and now has added Positron and Cerebras to its portfolio of chip suppliers.
与一家大客户达成的价值1亿美元年度经常性收入的协议，为该公司筹集1亿美元A轮融资铺平了道路，该轮融资由Blackbird Ventures和Abstract Ventures领投。General Compute在5月的种子轮融资后估值为6000万美元，现在投资者对其投后估值为8亿美元。
A deal with a large customer worth $100 million in annual recurring revenue has paved the way for the company to raise $100 million in Series A funding led by Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures. Valued at $60 million after a May seed round, General Compute is now worth $800 million post-money to its investors.
这家初创公司的策略是别人往哪走它就往哪走。它专注于推理芯片，而其他人都在追逐GPU。它没有承担建设大型数据中心的复杂工作，而是使用较小的电源，在其他公司的数据中心租用空间，并将前比特币挖矿场改造成运行AI模型的场所。
The startup’s strategy is to zig where others zag. It focused on chips built for inference while everyone else chased GPUs. And instead of taking on a complex effort to build huge data centers, it uses smaller power sources, rents space in other companies’ data centers, and converts former bitcoin-mining sites into places that run AI models.
这种做法意味着 General Compute 短期内不会跃居新型云服务商（neoclouds）前列，也不会与超大规模云服务商（hyperscalers）竞争。但它也避免了从零开始建设数据中心所面临的种种限制。当 General Compute 拿到芯片时，就会有地方插上它们。Puklowski 预计公司将在 2027 年部署 75 兆瓦的算力容量，他推测自己将能获得 200 兆瓦的电力——“可能比我们能融资采购硬件的规模还要大。”不过，该计划也有上限。
That approach means General Compute isn’t going to catapult into the top ranks of neoclouds or compete with hyperscalers any time soon. But it’s also not subject to the constraints that come with building data centers from scratch. When General Compute has chips, it will have someplace to plug them in. Puklowski expects the company to deploy 75 megawatts of computing capacity in 2027, and he suspects he will have access to 200 megawatts of power—“more than we can probably fund and get hardware for.”
Puklowski 的融资工作尚未完成——“无论是债务融资还是股权融资，资本运作都将成为我的全职工作，”他对 TechCrunch 表示。
Still, the plan has a limit. Puklowski’s financing work isn’t done—”capital is going to be a full-time job for me, both on debt and equity,” he told TechCrunch.
这家初创公司在专门为开发者提供高速推理服务的云厂商中找到了关键客户；General Compute 为它们提供裸金属服务器（即未预装任何软件层的原始服务器），以便它们将产品推向市场。共同领投本轮融资的 Blackbird 合伙人 James Palmer 表示，其机构对 General Compute 的信心部分源于对推理云公司 Baseten 的投资。
The startup has found key customers in cloud companies that specialize in offering developers high-speed inference; General Compute provides the bare metal, or raw servers with no software layered on top, for them to bring their offerings to market. James Palmer, a principal at Blackbird who co-led the round, said his firm’s confidence in General Compute comes in part from an investment in Baseten, an inference cloud company.
“过去 10 个月我们一直近距离观察 [Baseten] 的发展历程，见证了其疯狂的增长故事，以及对开放权重推理、企业拥有自主智能能力的旺盛需求，”Palmer 对 TechCrunch 说。谈到 General Compute，他表示，“Cerebras、Positron、SambaNova 这些芯片厂商都需要能将其推向规模化、能应对物理世界复杂性的分销合作伙伴。”
“We’ve been proximate to their journey over the last 10 months and observing the wild growth story that [Baseten] has gone on, and the demand for open weight inference, and for companies owning their own intelligence,” Palmer told TechCrunch. When it comes to General Compute, he said, “Cerebras, Positron, SambaNova, all need distribution partners who can take them to scale, who can navigate the complexity of the physical world.”
这三家芯片制造商的高管均向 TechCrunch 高度评价 General Compute，并一致指出该公司专注于让 AI 云算力的经济账算得过来的重要性。“这个市场上大家都在卖速度，”SambaNova 首席执行官兼联合创始人 Rodrigo Liang 说，“真正的问题是：你能不能靠这个赚到钱。”
Executives at all three chipmakers sang General Compute’s praises to TechCrunch, each noting the importance of the company’s focus on making the economics of AI cloud compute work. “Everyone in this market is selling speed,” Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova’s CEO and co-founder, said. “The real question is whether you can make money doing it.”