A startup that has spent years in stealth mode just walked into the AI hardware arena and essentially said, “we’re here now.” Etched revealed its Sohu chip and a rack-scale inference system on June 30, purpose-built for transformer-based large language model inference, claiming state-of-the-art results in throughput, latency, and power efficiency.
The company isn’t just shipping slides and promises. Etched says it has secured over $1 billion in signed customer contracts, with first rack shipments scheduled for this summer and plans to scale production toward gigawatt capacity by 2027.
What Etched actually built
The Sohu chip is an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. Instead of being a general-purpose processor that can do many things reasonably well (like Nvidia’s GPUs), it’s designed to do one thing exceptionally well. That one thing is transformer inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate outputs.
The chip was fabricated using TSMC’s N4P process node and achieved first-pass silicon success. That’s a notable detail for anyone who follows chip development. First-pass success means the design worked correctly on its initial manufacturing run, something that saves enormous amounts of time and money in the notoriously unforgiving world of semiconductor development.
