General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup founded by CEO Finn Puklowski and CTO Jason Goodison, secured a $400 million loan from tech investment firm Upper90, reported on July 17, 2026. The financing is described as possibly the first to use inference-specific chips as collateral, in this case SambaNova SN50 silicon, which the company says is power-efficient, avoids water-cooling requirements and delivers inference 16 times faster than GPU-based clouds. General Compute raised a $15 million seed round in May 2026 to build a neocloud around SambaNova hardware. Upper90 co-founder Billy Libby, a former Goldman Sachs trader, previously financed Crusoe's GPU purchases in 2021; his firm now argues open-source model inference is the next area of demand as GPU-backed lending, popularized by CoreWeave, has become commonplace.