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Shares in GSI Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: GSIT) are soaring for the second day in a row. The company, which specializes in semiconductor memory solutions, saw its stock price skyrocket 155% yesterday. Today, GSIT shares are up another 39% in premarket trading as of the time of this writing. But why? Here’s what you need to know. What is GSI? GSI Technology is a provider of semiconductor memory solutions. That means it specializes in developing memory chips and products that help process data. Subscribe to the Daily newsletter.Fast Company's trending stories delivered to you every day Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters Though the company isn’t as well-known as the bigger semiconductor memory solutions giants like Micron or Intel, it has been a staple of the semiconductor industry for three decades now. GSI was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. According to the company’s website, it has 158 employees and more than 120 granted patents. The company’s most recent products of note are the Gemini-I and Gemini-II associative processing units (APUs). These APUs use Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architectures, which can process tasks inside the memory itself without the need to transfer the data to an external processor. Why are GSI shares surging? Shares in GSI Technology surged 155% yesterday after the company announced the publication of a paper by researchers at Cornell University. This paper, titled “Characterizing and Optimizing Realistic Workloads on a Commercial Compute-in-SRAM Device,” found that the company’s associative processing units’ CIM architecture can match GPU-level performance of certain AI workloads but at a fraction of the energy consumption. And that energy consumption reduction is significant—up to 98% less energy is required compared to GPUs. Additionally, the company’s APU allow for the processing of retrieval tasks faster than traditional CPUs, which can reduce processing time by up to 80%. advertisement What’s so important about the Cornell paper? Like all companies, GSI Technologies makes claims about their products, which boast of their superior performance. But a company’s claims need not be backed up by independent research or scientific rigor. Cornell’s research paper effectively verifies large parts of GSI’s claims about its Gemini-I and Gemini-II associative processing units, which should give potential customers a lot more faith in the product—not to mention the company’s investors, too. The research was presented at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, aka “Micro 2025.” What is the potential impact of GSI’s breakthrough? AI computing is a very intensive task, requiring powerful GPUs and/or CPUs. Because these tasks are so compute-intensive, they require a lot of energy to carry out. More energy means higher costs. But if GSI’s associative processing units can deliver the same AI performance at a fraction of the energy expenditure required over traditional means, one of the largest costs of computing AI tasks drops tremendously. This is good not only for a customer’s bottom line but for the environment as well. GSIT shares have had a stellar 2025 so far Upon GSI’s announcement yesterday of the publication of the Cornell paper, the company’s stock skyrocketed. GSIT shares closed up a staggering 155.32% yesterday to $12.97 per share. As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading this morning, GSIT shares are up another another 39% to $18.15 per share. However, this stellar performance of GSIT shares is nothing new for the company’s stock price in 2025. As of yesterday’s close, GSIT shares have surged 328% since the year began. Over the past 12 months, the company’s stock price has grown 239%.
