Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip
Key takeaways
- Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year.
- Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers.
- Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. The startup says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips.
Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers. It calls these systems frontier inference clusters, bundles that include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software, all built to help frontier models run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals, Etched claims. (Inference is what happens after a user submits a prompt — it s currently the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest cost center for AI companies trying to serve customers at scale, which is exactly why investors are paying attention to anyone promising to solve it.)
Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said.