General Compute raises $100 million at $800 million valuation

General Compute has raised $100 million in Series A financing, giving the AI cloud computing startup a post-money valuation of $800 million. Blackbird Ventures and Abstract Ventures led the investment.

The financing followed an agreement with a large customer representing $100 million in annual recurring revenue. General Compute’s valuation stood at $60 million following its seed financing in May.

The company focuses on specialized chips for inference from competitors to Nvidia. It previously agreed to buy $400 million of chips from SambaNova and has since added Positron and Cerebras as suppliers.

Rather than constructing large data centers, General Compute rents space at existing facilities and repurposes former bitcoin-mining sites. Its customers include cloud providers offering developers fast inference services. General Compute supplies those businesses with raw servers without a software layer.

Co-founder and CEO Finn Puklowski expects General Compute to deploy computing capacity totaling 75 megawatts in 2027. He also thinks it will have access to 200 megawatts of power, potentially exceeding what it can finance and equip with hardware. Puklowski said raising both debt and equity would remain a full-time responsibility for him.