AMD signed a credit support agreement for the lease on phase one of Fermi's Project Matador, a 222 MW campus in Carson County, Texas, and the two companies agreed a framework for up to 650 MW more across phases two and three. Fermi calls the agreement a milestone toward project financing rather than completed financing, and lists the closing of the TensorWave lease, the first customer lease it announced in August, as a remaining condition; the release gives no amount, term or fee for AMD's support. We are seeing a chip vendor put its credit behind a customer's lease so a developer can raise project debt, which extends vendor financing from accelerators to the power and buildings that house them. (Fermi press release)
Private Companies
SUNMMIOfundraise
SUNMMIO completed Pre-A2 and Series A rounds led by Beijing state-backed investment platforms, including Yizhuang State Investment, and has raised nearly RMB 2B over the past year; round sizes were not disclosed. Its first-generation A4E chip taped out in June, stacking eight memory wafers on one logic wafer for a claimed 16 TB/s of memory bandwidth. (TechNode)
Emerging
HBM power: A paper from Ataberk Olgun, et al, Understanding the Power Consumption of Modern High Bandwidth Memory: Experimental Analysis and Modeling Using Real HBM2 DRAM Chips, characterizes the power draw of 36 real HBM2 chips. Toggling all internal bank-group bus signals raises power 29.4% over holding them constant, and an engineered access pattern draws 23.6% more on average than the highest-power JEDEC-specified current measurement loop. A new model predicts the chips within 7.6% to 8.1% error and, on a power-intensive microbenchmark, lands within 2.4% to 5.3% of the HBM3E power measured on three Nvidia H200s. Bounding HBM power with JEDEC test loops can understate real draw under AI workloads, which matters for thermal and power budgets. (arXiv)