The AI chip startup Etched announced on Tuesday that it has emerged from stealth, disclosing it has secured a total of $8 billion in funding and signed over $10 billion in customer contracts. The company plans to begin shipping its rack-scale inference systems to customers this summer.
The most recent round in this funding haul was a $5 billion investment completed in December last year, valuing the company at $50 billion post-money. The lead investor was Stripes, with participation from Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, Ribbit Capital, and other institutions and individuals. Quantitative trading giant Jane Street also led a previously undisclosed funding round, bringing its total investment in Etched to over $1 billion.
Etched was founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen. The company's Sohu chip is designed specifically for Transformer models, embedding the model architecture directly into the chip rather than relying on general-purpose GPUs. Etched stated it has achieved first-pass silicon success for its A0 chip using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing's (TSM) N4P process and is currently validating its first rack-scale product with customers.
The company's team has grown to over 400 people, with many members hailing from companies like NVIDIA (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), Google's TPU team, and SK Hynix. Etched operates a data center and prototyping lab at its San Jose headquarters and has a manufacturing facility in Taiwan, with a goal of achieving gigawatt-scale production capacity by 2027.
As the AI industry's focus shifts from model training to inference, the inference chip market is attracting a significant influx of capital. Etched is one of the few startups currently offering a complete rack system rather than just chips.
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