Inference chip startup Etched emerges from stealth with $800m funding, unveils working chip

Inference chip startup Etched had launched from stealth with $800 million in funding.

The company also announced it had developed a working chip and already signed more than $1 billion in customer contracts.

– Etched

The funding was raised over multiple rounds, the company said, the latest being a $500 million round that provided Etched with a $5 billion post-money valuation in December. Investors in the startup include VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Stripes, Radical Ventures, Primary VC, alongside Peter Thiel. Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton.

Etched’s unnamed chip was produced on TSMC’s N4P process technology, and the company is now validating its rack-scale product with customers. The chip uses an architecture that creates a shared low-latency memory pool across the entire scale-up domain, the company said, adding that its proprietary ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect enables “dramatically faster” memory access across chips.