Taalas HC1: 17,000 Tokens/Second on Custom Silicon

Canadian startup Taalas unveiled its HC1 chip — a hardwired implementation of Llama 3.1 8B that generates 17,000 tokens per second per user, 73x faster than NVIDIA's H200 at one-tenth the power. Using aggressive quantization (3-bit and 6-bit) on TSMC N6 at 815mm2 die size, drawing ~250W per card. Over $200M raised, ~25 employees. Second chip for a reasoning model by early summer. This represents a radical approach: model-specific silicon trading flexibility for extreme speed.