Nvidia AI chip rivals attract record funding as competition heats up

Nvidia currently dominates AI chip manufacturing, but startups are raising record funding to compete with alternative designs optimized for AI inference (deploying trained models in real applications). Investors are increasingly backing these new companies, with $8.3 billion raised globally in 2026, because they argue that purpose-built chip architectures can deliver significant energy and cost savings compared to Nvidia's GPUs, which were originally designed for gaming.