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

Architect Labs cofounders Ebrahim Hussain and Aaditya Subedi.

Bonnie Rae Mills The startup Architect Labs says it used AI to design and verify a chip in two weeks.

An AI model running on the chip then found ways to improve it, its 20-year-old cofounder said.

Researchers called the speed impressive, though they said manufacturing will be the ultimate test.

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.