The chips powering AI can take years to design. This startup says AI did it in 2 weeks.

The chips powering AI can take years to design. This startup says AI did it in 2 weeks.

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Geoff Weiss

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AI is coming for one of the hardest jobs in the technology industry: chip design.

The nascent startup Architect Labs, founded last year, is betting on the promise of using AI to accelerate design for both chipmakers and companies seeking custom hardware. It says it designed and verified a chip called Redwood in two weeks, with two human chip architects setting and refining the overall plan while AI handled the detailed design work.

It would dramatically speed up a process that typically takes a year or more, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and requires large, specialized teams of around 100 people, the company said.

This lengthy timeline is especially problematic in AI, where models evolve faster than the chips they run on, said Architect Labs cofounder and CEO Ebrahim Hussain, who is 20.

Architect emerged from stealth in June with a $24 million seed round led by Kindred Ventures. Google's former chief scientist, Jeff Dean, and other executives from OpenAI and Nvidia also backed the startup.

Hao Zheng, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Central Florida, called the Redwood timeline "impressive," though he said several startups and more established companies, such as Synopsys, also use AI to accelerate the chip design process.

The Redwood experiment revealed something else, said Hussain. After running an AI model on Redwood, the model found ways to improve the chip itself, which he said suggests a self-reinforcing loop.

"It's still very early, but we're very excited about the possibility of growing to larger models and getting AI to essentially recursively improve itself and build better and better hardware," Hussain said.

Redwood can run AI models like Meta's Llama and Alibaba's Qwen, Architect said, though there's a caveat — it hasn't been manufactured yet. Instead, the design has been tested on reprogrammable hardware known as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and Architect said those tests suggest the finished product could be more efficient than Nvidia's Jetson Orin Nano, an AI supercomputer used in robotics.

Hussain said the company plans to send Redwood to the Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC to be manufactured and hasn't decided when because its AI is still working to improve the design.

Manufacturing is the real test, said Zheng, and it will ultimately reveal how fast, efficient, and reliable the chip is.

Matthew Guthaus, a computer science and engineering professor at UC Santa Cruz, said that while AI is already good at many parts of chip design, "it can also make silly mistakes and needs close supervision and double-checking."

These errors can cost millions if they aren't caught before manufacturing, Guthaus said. Hussain said that Architect's AI system checks its own work for mistakes rather than relying on humans to do so.

Hussain said that AI could usher in a new era for the chip industry. While TSMC helped introduce a "fabless" era, allowing companies like Nvidia to design chips without owning factories, he says the next phase will be "designless" — putting custom chips within reach without the huge teams traditionally required to build them.

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Geoff Weiss

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Geoff Weiss is a senior reporter on Business Insider’s tech team, where he writes about AI startups and Y Combinator, the intersection of AI and the media industry, and workplace dynamics within top AI labs and chip companies.Previously, Geoff was on the media desk, covering YouTube and Netflix, and themes like the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy. His work on Netflix’s video podcasting ambitions and Mr Beast’s lessons for Hollywood won second and first prize, respectively, at the 2025 LA Press Club Awards.Prior to joining Business Insider, Geoff was the senior editor of Tubefilter and a staff writer at Entrepreneur. He graduated from New York University with a degree in English Literature.He can be reached at [email protected], on Signal @geoffweiss.25, and on LinkedIn. Have a tip? Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.Selected stories:Nvidia crushed its quarter — and CEO Jensen Huang said in a leaked all-hands that 'the market did not appreciate it'Nvidia will foot the bill for Trump's new visa fees. Here's what CEO Jensen Huang told staff.Massive AI salaries and RTO are fueling a real estate boom in San Francisco: 'It's going to rain money'The AI talent wars are ricocheting across startups. Here's how they're competing with Big Tech.

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