AI News Brief: General Compute, a startup focused on AI inference cloud computing, just secured a $400M loan from tech investment firm Upper90 — likely the first financing deal using ‘inference-specific chips’ as collateral. These chips are designed to run trained AI models quickly and efficiently, costing far less than the high-end chips used for training. The deal reflects the market’s response to concerns about inflated AI tool and token pricing, shifting toward infrastructure that can run open-source models at lower cost rather than the latest frontier lab LLMs. General Compute was founded by CEO Finn Puklowski and closed a $15M seed round in May, building an inference-focused neocloud (distinct from general-purpose hyperscalers like AWS and Azure) around Intel-backed chipmaker SambaNova. Its SN50 chip is purpose-built for inference — power-efficient and requiring no expensive water cooling — enabling faster deployment across more diverse data centers than GPUs, with claims of 16x faster inference than GPU clouds. The challenge is how startups can secure enough chips. Upper90 co-founder and CEO Billy Libby, a former Goldman Sachs quant, provided a GPU procurement loan to energy-focused data center startup Crusoe in 2021, widely considered the first loan using advanced chip value as collateral; now that the GPU market has matured or possibly over-procured, Upper90 is betting on the next growth wave in inference. Libby points out that open-source models are rising in importance — services like OpenRouter and Fireworks have recently closed rounds at high valuations, new models like Kimi K3 match Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest versions on coding benchmarks, and chipmakers like Groq and Cerebras are drawing attention from acquirers and public markets.