source: techcrunch ai: nvidia competitor etched hits $5b valuation, $1b in sales for ai chip
level: business
etched, a startup building specialized ai chips for inference, announced it has booked $1 billion in contract orders for its frontier inference clusters. these systems combine custom chips, racks, and software designed to run large model inference faster and more efficiently than general-purpose gpus. the company is currently testing its first product with customers after tsmc successfully manufactured the chip earlier this year.
the startup also disclosed it has raised $800 million to date, including a $500 million round closed in december at a $5 billion post-money valuation. investors include venturetech alliance, jane street, hudson river trading, two sigma, ribbit capital, and stripes. angel backers feature ai researchers andrej karpathy, geoffrey hinton, and fei-fei li. etched was founded in 2022 by harvard dropouts gavin uberti and robert wachen, who became thiel fellows.
etched’s progress comes amid surging investor interest in ai inference hardware. competitor cerebras had a strong ipo this year, groq raised $650 million, and major cloud providers build their own chips. even openai recently announced a custom chip built by broadcom. etched initially struggled to raise funds in 2023, operating month-to-month, but now benefits from a market eager for alternatives to nvidia’s dominance in ai compute.
why it matters: specialized inference chips could lower costs and energy use for serving large ai models, directly impacting the scalability of ai applications.
source: techcrunch ai: nvidia competitor etched hits $5b valuation, $1b in sales for ai chip