AI chip startup Etched more than doubles valuation to $10.3B in new $300M round
Etched Inc., a startup with a chip optimized for artificial intelligence inference, today announced that it has raised $300 million in funding.
The Series C round was led by Sequoia. SK Hynix Inc., the world’s largest supplier of memory for AI chips, participated as well alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street and Diffusion. Etched is now valued at $10.3 billion, more than double what it was worth in December.
Nvidia Corp.’s popular graphics cards are designed to run both AI training and inference workloads. According to Etched, optimizing its chip solely for the latter use case enabled it to develop a more efficient design. The company plans to ship the processor as part of an appliance equipped with custom cooling components and interconnects.
When an AI model receives a prompt, it kicks off the inference workflow by performing so-called prefill processing. That step helps the model understand the prompt’s meaning. The task is carried out with matrix multiplications, hardware-intensive mathematical calculations that differ significantly from a regular multiplication.
