Upper90 just handed General Compute $400 million secured by SambaNova inference chips, not Nvidia GPUs, betting the same trick that helped reshape AI infrastructure lending can work a second time.
General Compute has never designed a chip, and it doesn't own a data center either. What it has is $300 million worth of SambaNova SN50 processors on order, according to TechCrunch, and, as of this month, a $400 million credit facility from Upper90 to help pay for them. The loan is notable for one reason. The collateral isn't a GPU.
Upper90, the New York investment firm run by former Goldman Sachs trader Billy Libby, structured the facility around inference chips rather than the Nvidia hardware that has backed nearly every AI infrastructure loan to date. General Compute calls itself an inference neocloud. That's a company that rents out processing power for the moment a trained model actually answers a user, not the more publicized business of training one. Libby put the broader bet plainly: "Not everyone needs a supercomputer, but everyone does need inference and AI."
The chips themselves are the pitch. SambaNova's SN50 is air-cooled. That means General Compute can drop it into existing data centers and repurposed crypto-mining facilities, without the liquid-cooling retrofits that GPU clusters increasingly require. TechCrunch reported in May that General Compute chief executive Finn Puklowski said the chips would generate 600 to 700 tokens per second, compared with about 250 tokens per second for GPUs. That's General Compute's own figure, not an independently audited benchmark. Treat it that way until a neutral test confirms it.
General Compute is barely a year old. It raised just $15 million in seed funding in May, led by FUSE VC with Carya Venture Partners and Village Global Ventures, at a $60 million post-money valuation, TechCrunch reported. A $400 million loan against a company that small only makes sense if the lender believes the collateral, not the balance sheet, carries the risk.
Upper90 has run this play before. In 2021, the firm financed GPU purchases for Crusoe Energy in what was, at the time, an odd bet: banks wouldn't touch chip-backed lending because nobody knew how fast a GPU's resale value would fall. Crusoe's cloud business grew. The structure Upper90 pioneered became part of the financing template later used across AI infrastructure, most visibly by CoreWeave, which went public in March 2025 and closed an $8.5 billion delayed draw term loan facility this March. CoreWeave said that financing was secured by high-performance computing infrastructure and a customer contract.
Puklowski frames the loan as more than a funding round. "This is not just a startup that got some money for compute," he said. "This is the first sign that capital is organizing and fragmenting Nvidia's monopolistic dominance." That's a big claim. It isn't ridiculous, but it isn't proven either.
Everyone Wants In on Inference
Money already agrees that inference is where the fight is moving. SambaNova said on July 8 that it completed the first close of a $1 billion Series F financing at an $11 billion post-money valuation, led by General Atlantic with Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates and Capital Group joining in. TechCrunch noted that the round came about five months after SambaNova announced its SN50 chip alongside a $350 million Series E. That is a fast repricing for a company that had drifted out of the loudest part of the Nvidia conversation.
Groq took a different route to the same market. It signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia in December, then announced a $650 million raise in June to expand its inference cloud. TechCrunch and Axios reported the Nvidia transaction at roughly $20 billion. Etched, another inference-chip startup, came out of stealth on June 30 saying it had raised $800 million and signed more than $1 billion in customer contracts. Cerebras, for its part, said in January that it signed a multi-year OpenAI deal to deploy 750 megawatts of wafer-scale systems for high-speed inference.
None of that guarantees General Compute wins its bet on SambaNova specifically. It does tell you the capital chasing inference silicon is real, not speculative noise around one debt facility.
What nobody in this market has yet is a track record. GPU-backed lending works, when it works, because there are now years of resale data on how fast an Nvidia chip loses value and how deep the secondary market runs. Inference ASICs like the SN50 don't have that history. If SambaNova's chips hold their performance edge and General Compute keeps landing colocation deals, Upper90's bet looks early. If the tokens-per-second numbers don't survive contact with real customer workloads, the firm is holding collateral nobody has ever had to resell.
Also read: Xi Jinping tells the world AI should be a symphony, not a solo performance • Apple Hands China's AI Brain to Alibaba to Get Apple Intelligence Approved • Hackers hijacked Brian Chesky's X account to push an AI-written crypto tokenization thread
