XCENA Raises $135M Betting Memory Bandwidth — Not Compute — Is AI's Real Bottleneck

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South Korean chip startup XCENA raised $135M in Series B at a $570M valuation for its MX1 chip, which embeds thousands of compute cores directly inside memory modules to eliminate expensive GPU data round-trips. Founded by Samsung and SK Hynix veterans, XCENA targets mass production on Samsung's foundry by end of 2026 with revenue expected in 2027. The thesis: memory bandwidth, not GPU supply, is AI infrastructure's defining limit.