AI Startups Are Putting the Silicon Back in Silicon Valley

It’s taken about 25 years, but Silicon Valley finally feels like the old-school Silicon Valley again.

Nvidia Corp. has so totally dominated the market for the chips that power artificial intelligence software that other companies have decided they’re willing to pursue the often-disastrous exercise of designing their own semiconductors. History tells us that designing a chip from scratch takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars and usually ends without victory. Yet the promise of AI is simply so great that people have decided they must try.

Two of these brave souls are Mike Gunter and Reiner Pope. They’ve founded ...