A startup called Majestic Labs, founded by three former Google and Meta silicon engineers, has recently secured $100 million in funding, aiming to develop high-capacity AI servers to reduce the costs of large data centers.

Majestic Labs was founded in 2023 by Ofer Shacham, Sha Rabii, and Masumi Reynders. The company is developing a patent-pending silicon architecture that promises its servers will have 1,000 times the memory capacity of traditional enterprise servers. The company claims its system can replace up to ten existing server racks, significantly reducing power, cooling, and space requirements for large AI data centers.

Majestic Labs' $71 million Series A funding was led by Bow Wave Capital, with Lux Capital participating. The company has been operating quietly since late 2023 and currently has fewer than 50 employees in Los Altos, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel. It is expected to launch a prototype by 2027, with pre-orders already under discussion.

Shacham, CEO of Majestic, said in an interview with CNBC: "We are not trying to completely replace GPUs, but rather focus on memory-intensive AI workloads, addressing the limitations of fixed compute-to-memory ratios." The company aims to provide solutions for hyperscale data centers and data-intensive industries such as finance and pharmaceuticals.

Global investment in data center infrastructure is surging, with tech giants such as Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon expected to spend over $380 billion on capital expenditures by 2025, largely driven by AI workloads.

Majestic's architecture aims to "compress" multiple hardware racks into a single server, the founders say, which will significantly improve efficiency. Shacham added: "NVIDIA's GPUs are excellent and have driven AI innovation, but our goal is to complement them by addressing the memory bottleneck."

The three founders have collaborated for two decades. Reynders joined Google in 2003 and later became the head of silicon product management; Rabii sold his chip design company to Google and led the Argos video chip team at YouTube; Shacham sold Chip Genesis to Google in 2013 and was responsible for silicon design for consumer hardware. In 2018, the three joined Meta to establish the Facebook Advanced Silicon Team (FAST). After layoffs in Reality Labs in 2023, they reunited to create Majestic Labs, focusing on the memory bottleneck issue in AI infrastructure.

"We have always been friends and colleagues, so the idea of working together on something exciting has always existed," Reynders said.

Key Points:

🌟 Majestic Labs has secured $100 million in funding, focusing on developing high-capacity AI servers.

🚀 The company promises its servers will have 1,000 times the memory capacity of traditional servers, significantly reducing data center costs.

💡 The founding team has extensive experience in silicon design, aiming to address the memory bottleneck in AI workloads.