Etched, a California-based startup that develops AI inference chips, said it raised US$300 million at a US$10.3 billion valuation in a round led by Sequoia Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, Argo, and SK hynix.

The company said it has started fabricating inference clusters worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It also built a 10-megawatt lab about 15 minutes from its office to test its first-generation hardware and prototype future versions.

Founded in 2022, Etched said it has raised $800 million across four financings.

Etched said its first chip, Sohu, is a transformer-only ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, for autoregressive language model inference.

The company said the chip hard-wires transformer attention into silicon instead of relying on programmable compute such as general-purpose graphics processing units.

Etched also said it has signed US$1 billion in sales contracts for its systems, but it has not publicly named the customers.

🔗 Source: Etched

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