Auradine, a startup building hardware for Bitcoin mining and AI, recently raised a massive $153 million. This funding round was co-led by StepStone Group. The extension of the Series D round included participation from Samsung Catalyst Fund, Qualcomm Ventures and other unspecified investors. This new funding pushes Auradine’s total outside investment to more than $300 million.
The move comes as the company builds out its growing hardware ecosystem. Meanwhile US-based innovators, Viseon, are launching the AH3880, a next-generation system delivering enhanced performance and efficiency. Auradine revealed that its hardware is now deployed in the data centers of over 40 Bitcoin mining companies.
The AH3880 uses water cooling while it’s a method vastly superior to immersion cooling and other standard fan systems. The unit is powered by a proprietary chip built on next-generation three-nanometer technology. This remarkable little chip is capable of performing an incomprehensible 600 trillion hashing operations per second! Auradine boasts that its equipment offers as much as five times the performance of the last-gen hardware to which everyone is accustomed.
“Both bitcoin and AI convert energy into economic value and require highly energy-efficient, scalable and flexible infrastructure solutions,” - Rajiv Khemani
The AH3880 includes demand response technology that automatically lowers energy use when demand on the utility is high. The onboard firmware constantly monitors for overheating and throttles performance to maintain safe operating temperatures. Combined with a very intelligent design that avoids the frequent reboots of competing software, this is a real differentiator.
In addition to its Bitcoin mining hardware, Auradine is developing network hardware to link graphics cards into computing clusters. To do that, the company intends to leverage UAL and Ultra Ethernet Link, two open-source networking standards designed specifically for AI clusters.
The Auradine team is comprised of former employees of Cisco Systems Inc., Juniper Networks Inc., and Broadcom Inc.
