The funding round includes participation from the Qatar Investment Authority, the nation's sovereign wealth fund, which has been placing greater emphasis on developing AI infrastructure. This Series B investment for the Reno-based startup arrives at a time when major cloud providers and AI companies are actively working to lessen their dependence on Nvidia, the established market leader.

Among these firms is OpenAI, which, despite being one of Nvidia's biggest and most significant clients, has reportedly expressed dissatisfaction with some of the chipmaker's newest AI offerings and began exploring other options last year. Concurrently, Qatar is accelerating a wider initiative to build dedicated "sovereign" AI infrastructure, a key theme highlighted during the recent Web Summit Qatar in Doha.

This strategic direction is already materializing through substantial investments, such as a $20 billion AI infrastructure partnership with Brookfield Asset Management that was revealed in September. With this latest capital infusion, Positron has now raised a total of just over $300 million since its founding three years ago.

The company had previously secured $75 million last year from backers including Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, DFJ Growth, Flume Ventures, and Resilience Reserve. Positron asserts that its inaugural chip, named Atlas and produced in Arizona, delivers performance comparable to Nvidia's H100 GPUs while consuming less than one-third of the power.

The startup specializes in inference—the computational process required to operate AI models in practical applications—rather than in training large language models. This focus positions Positron to meet the growing demand for inference hardware as businesses increasingly pivot from model development to large-scale deployment.