Exclusive: Nvidia and ChipAgents Launch Evaluation For AI-Powered Chip Design

Nvidia and ChipAgents, a startup that helps customers automate chip design, on Wednesday released a benchmark that measures how different AI models perform at the task.

Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 powered the best-performing AI agent in the newly released evaluation but only scored 16.6% on the test, ChipAgents said. According to CEO William Wang, ChipAgents made its benchmark more difficult than existing ones by covering the entire chip design process, not just a part of it, which is how other evaluations work.

The new evaluation comes as AI appears to be speeding up the field. It previously took at least two years to develop an AI chip, said Wang. Now, the latest models have helped bring down that timeline closer to one year by automating away a lot of the manual work (like combing through hundreds of pages of data to find simulation errors) necessary to verify that chip designs can work in practice before producing the physical chips. Wang thinks that in the coming year, AI advances will further compress the process to four to six months.

ChipAgents was founded in 2024 and has raised $134 million to date from B Capital, memory designer Micron and chip designer Mediatek. Wang said the company counts several semiconductor design companies with multibillion-dollar market caps as customers. He declined to name them or say whether Nvidia was an investor or customer.