Etched Raises $800 Million and Unveils Chips for AI Inference
Etched, an artificial intelligence chip startup founded by two Harvard dropouts, has emerged from stealth after three years, announcing $800 million in total funding and $1 billion in signed customer contracts. The company disclosed that its custom silicon has completed its initial tapeout—the final stage of chip design sent to manufacturing—and that the first racks featuring the hardware will ship to customers this summer.
Etched claims its first generation chips will outperform current graphics processors for AI inference, the process of running trained machine learning models, by significantly improving speed and power efficiency. The startup’s architecture relies on two novel approaches: lowering operating voltage to overcome thermal limits during compute-heavy tasks, and implementing cluster-scale memory to reduce data transfer delays across chip clusters. Etched’s vertically integrated systems, which combine the silicon with custom software and manufacturing, compete directly with existing AI accelerator makers as enterprises race to handle the growing computational demands of large language models.
From the sources (25 posts)
@kimmonismusEtched is coming out of stealth with $800M raised, $1B+ in customer contracts, first racks shipping this summer, and claims of SOTA inference throughput, latency, and power efficiency. But holy, look who backed the funding. The who-is-who
@patrick_oshagThree years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world. Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible. Today, Etched (@Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total r
@lpolovetsRT @patrick_oshag: Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world. Almos…
@mtsliveSITUATION DETECTED: Etched, a startup building custom AI inference chips, has emerged from stealth, announcing $1B+ in customer contracts and $800M raised after a successful chip tapeout.
@techmemeAI chip startup Etched says it has raised $800M from investors including Jane Street and a venture firm linked to TSMC, and has signed sales contracts worth $1B (@dinabass / Bloomberg) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!
@edludlowRT @business: AI chip startup Etched says it has raise $800 million and has $1 billion in sales contracts.
@stevehou👀
@brendanfoody@UbertiGavin, @robertwachen, and @czhu1729 are some of the best founders in Silicon Valley. Excited to start using @Etched chips this summer 🎉
@jasonrshumanThis company is going to put a dent in the universe. Off the charts performance. Insane time to market. Eye popping customer demand. World-Class Team.
@ml_hardwareRT @Etched: We're coming out of stealth. We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m…
@tri_daoIt's wild how quickly Etched designed and got the chips out, all within 2 years. They went deep, hardcoding attention into silicon and getting very high MFU. This kind of hardware tailored made for LLM inference is soon gonna bring cost of
@millionintChips are a substrate for computation that the layer of intelligence we're all building relies on. Like every layer of the stack, it requires dedication, hard work, taking risks and innovating. Etched Sohu has all those in spades and I'm
@aiexplainedytI remember saying on the channel, in Dec 2023, 'if Etched take over the world, you heard it here first.' They do seem to be somewhat on their way.
@jubertiThe world needs faster and cheaper inference compute, and it's amazing to see Etched releasing their 10x solution. Great work @UbertiGavin and team!!!
@mathemagic1anBeen watching demos of Etched for years now and still blows me away every time Crazy ambitious strategy to scale inference. Cluster-scale memory w/ latency of SRAM but cheap like HBM. Proud to be a backer of these guys, absolute rocketshi
@mattshumer_Nvidia is worth $5T because the world realized inference is the new oil. If Etched’s chips are meaningfully better than Nvidia’s for inference… What is Etched worth? This is a worldview-shattering event.
@mattshumer_I’m a very early investor in Etched, as I’ve believed for years that inference will be the biggest market we’ve ever seen. Incredibly impressed by the team’s execution and so excited to use models powered by their hardware!
@himanshustwtsnew ai inference hardware company, just dropped!
@mattshumer_Nvidia has some serious competition coming their way.
@jasonrshumanRT @patrick_oshag: Inference will never be the same: Etched invented two new ways to massively improve compute cost, speed, and per watt ef…
@edludlowRT @austinsemis: At the end of the interview, Gavin mentions @Etched VP of Platform Brian Loiler, who was an early employee at Nvidia and h…
@colossusmagRT @patrick_oshag: Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world. Almos…
@dmdohanBig if true, and afaict it's true congrats to the Etched team on getting inference running on their new chips!
@jordanjacobs10RT @tri_dao: It's wild how quickly Etched designed and got the chips out, all within 2 years. They went deep, hardcoding attention into sil…
@jordanjacobs10RT @Etched: Vertically integrating the full inference hardware stack is extremely hard. Hear @UbertiGavin and @robertwachen share three ye…