The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded a grant worth $18.6 million to Princeton University and technology company EnCharge AI, which have partnered on a multi-year project under DARPA's Optimum Processing Technology Inside Memory Arrays program. The $78 million OPTIMA program seeks to develop compute-in-memory accelerators for the handling of artificial intelligence workloads relevant to defense, EnCharge AI said Wednesday.

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EnCharge AI closed its second institutional funding round – which saw participation from RTX Ventures, VentureTech Alliance and ACVC Partners – and secured $22.6 million in additional funds from strategic partners. EnCharge AI, which has raised $45 million to date, said Tuesday the funding round underscores the demand for new AI chips.