There is a very specific kind of confidence required to build a chip company and take on Nvidia. Etched, a startup founded in 2022 by two former Harvard students, appears to have that in abundance, and now has the capital to back it up.
The company has raised $800 million and secured $1 billion in sales contracts, according to Bloomberg, marking a significant escalation for one of the more closely watched bets in AI hardware.
What Etched is actually building
Etched’s core product is a chip called Sohu, an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) built from the ground up for transformer-based AI model inference.
In English: most AI chips, including Nvidia’s GPUs, are general-purpose. Sohu does one thing only, running the class of AI models that powers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and most everything else you interact with. The trade-off is flexibility for raw efficiency.
