AI hardware startup Etched, a US-based company that builds systems for AI inference, said on Aug. 18 that it raised US$700 million in a funding round that valued the company at US$21 billion.

Jane Street led the round, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global also participating.

Etched said it has raised US$1.9 billion to date and secured more than US$1 billion in customer contracts across public and private AI companies, and cloud providers.

The company said it is building rack-scale AI inference systems that combine chips, racks, and software, and that its first racks will ship this summer.

Founded by Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, the startup is built around Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit designed for transformer-model inference.

Etched has said some models could run 20x faster and more cheaply than Nvidia H100 GPUs, though it did not cite an independent benchmark.

The company has not publicly named the AI or cloud customers behind its reported contract backlog.

🔗 Source: Reuters

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