SAN FRANCISCO, July 29 (Reuters) - Enfabrica, a Silicon

Valley-based chip startup working on solving bottlenecks in

artificial intelligence data centers, on Tuesday released a

chip-and-software system aimed at reining in the cost of memory

chips in those centers.

Enfabrica, which has raised $260 million in venture capital to

date and is backed by Nvidia ( NVDA ), released a system it

calls EMFASYS, pronounced like "emphasis."

The system aims to address the fact that a portion of the high

cost of flagship AI chips from Nvidia ( NVDA ) or rivals such as Advanced

Micro Devices ( AMD ) is not the computing chips themselves, but

the expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) attached to them that

is required to keep those speedy computing chips supplied with

data. Those HBM chips are supplied by makers such as SK Hynix ( HXSCF )

and Micron Technology ( MU ).

The Enfabrica system uses a special networking chip that it has

designed to hook the AI computing chips up directly to boxes

filled with another kind of memory chip called DDR5 that is

slower than its HBM counterpart but much cheaper.

By using special software, also made by Enfabrica, to route data

back and forth between AI chips and large amounts of lower-cost

memory, Enfabrica is hoping its chip will keep data center

speeds up but costs down as tech companies ramp up chatbots and

AI agents, said Enfabrica Co-Founder and CEO Rochan Sankar.

Rochan said Enfabrica has three "large AI cloud" customers

using the chip but declined to disclose their names.

"It's not replacing" HBM, Sankar told Reuters. "It is capping

(costs) where those things would otherwise have to blow through

the roof in order to scale to what people are expecting."