The Biden administration has forced a Saudi Aramco venture capital firm to sell its shares in a Silicon Valley AI chip startup backed by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
Altman-backed Rain Neuromorphics, a startup designing chips that mimic the way the brain works and aims to serve companies using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, raised $25 million in 2022.
Prosperity7, a lead investor in the funding round that raised the $25 million for Rain AI, sold its shares in the startup after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, people familiar with the matter said, according to the Bloomberg report.
The agency, the primary U.S. watchdog for deals with national security implications, instructed the Saudi fund to unwind that deal sometime over the past year, the report said.
Altman and the U.S. Treasury, which oversees the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) process, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
CFIUS is an inter-agency committee, chaired by the Department of Treasury, which reviews foreign investments in U.S. businesses and real estate that implicate national security concerns.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Sherry Jacob-Phillips)
