The AI chip firm SiMa.ai, based in Silicon Valley, claimed to have raised an extra $13 million from investors, including a significant Taiwanese fund named VentureTech Alliance that has a close strategic alliance with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

This is at least VentureTech Alliance's third investment in American chip firms in the last month. When Ayar Labs raised an additional $25 million and Ethernovia an additional $64 million in May, VentureTech invested.

Up to this point, SiMa.ai has raised a total of $200 million.

“The over-funding is in the training market and in the data center market,” said Navin Chaddha, managing director of investment firm Mayfield and founder of several chip startups. Chaddha made a personal investment in this latest round.

While ChatGPT's viral success has generated a new wave of investments in AI hardware, other businesses that received significant funding in earlier years are already experiencing difficulties.

SiMa.ai creates software and hardware for industrial robots, drones, security cameras, and eventually self-driving automobiles to use AI algorithms. According to Chaddha, there are few competitors in that sector despite the enormous market.

“(SiMa.ai’s) valuations, even though they’re respectable, they’re not at the historic multi-billion dollar valuations that the datacenter players had at the time,” said Moshe Gavrielov, SiMa.ai’s board member who is also on the board of TSMC.

The difficulties of British AI chip unicorn Graphcore have been widely chronicled.

The business, which was launched in 2018, was already making money, according to CEO and founder Krishna Rangasayee, and more than 50 customers were testing its chips.

Rangasayee also mentioned a recent benchmark testing finding from SiMa.ai, which outperformed AI chip industry leader Nvidia Corp in terms of performance and power of chips used in gadgets like cameras, drones, and robots.

The engineering organization MLCommons, which maintains testing benchmarks extensively used in the AI chip business, publishes the testing data.

“To me, it’s a David versus Goliath. In reality, Nvidia is the primary competitor for us and…we are better than them in performance and in power,” said Rangasayee.