RISC-V Chip Startup Receives $21.5M in Funding for AI CPU Performance Solution

On February 8, 2022, the European Commission formally proposed what's commonly referred to as the European Chips Act. The legislation plans to build on Europe's strengths and address weaknesses to develop a thriving domestic semiconductor ecosystem and resilient supply chain, while setting measures to anticipate and respond to future supply chain disruptions. In the short term, the Act seeks to bolster EU capabilities to anticipate future chips crises, strengthen manufacturing activities in the EU, and support scale-up and innovation across the whole value chain. In the mid- to long-term, it seeks to reinforce Europe's technological leadership while developing mechanisms to support transfer of knowledge from the lab to the fab and position Europe as a technology leader in innovative downstream markets.

Recently, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) trained the first large artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to understand, speak, and write in the Spanish language. The system, named MarIA, was trained on the MareNostrum supercomputer at the BSC, leveraging 59 TBs of language data from the Biblioteca Nacional de España, one of the world's largest public libraries. The model is said to be an expert in both writing and understanding the Spanish language and is free to use by any developer, company, or entity. The system has a wide variety of potential applications including summarization applications, chatbots, smart searches, translation engines, and automatic subtitling chatbots.