A two-year-old startup just walked out of stealth mode with $800 million in funding, over $1 billion in forward sales contracts, and a chip it claims can replace up to 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs for certain workloads. Etched officially introduced itself to the world on June 30, carrying a $5 billion valuation.
The company’s weapon of choice is the Sohu chip, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) built exclusively for transformer model inference. Rather than building a general-purpose GPU that can do many things well, Etched built a chip that does one thing, running transformer-based AI models, and claims to do it dramatically better than anything else on the market.
What Etched is actually building
Founded in 2022 by Harvard Thiel Fellows Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, Etched has assembled a team of over 400 engineers, many poached from Nvidia, Google’s TPU division, and Broadcom. The company isn’t just designing chips in isolation. It’s building full rack-scale inference systems, co-designing the hardware components to squeeze maximum performance out of every watt.
The Sohu chip is fabricated on TSMC’s advanced N4P process node. First-pass silicon has already been achieved, meaning the initial physical chips came back from the fab working as intended.
