General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has landed a $400 million loan from Upper90, a tech investment firm. It might be the first deal to put up inference-specific chips as collateral — chips built to run already trained AI models quickly and efficiently, rather than the more expensive chips used to build the models in the first place.

The financing is the latest signal that markets are responding to concerns over the price of AI tools and tokens by turning to infrastructure that runs open source models more cheaply than the newest LLMs from frontier labs.