Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month
AI chip startup Etched has raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by quantitative trading firm Jane Street, which tested and subsequently bought the company's hardware. The pace of the valuation increase is remarkable even by the standards of the current AI boom, reflecting strong investor confidence in Etched's approach to accelerating AI inference, the computing process that occurs after a user submits a prompt to an AI model.
Etched was valued at just $5 billion in December, before raising a $300 million Series C round at $10.3 billion in July, meaning its valuation has now doubled again within a month, adding nearly $11 billion. The company sells complete systems it calls "frontier inference clusters," featuring a custom low-voltage prefill chip and a new "cluster-scale memory" interconnect designed to speed up both stages of inference while cutting costs. Etched has also moved away from its original premise of etching a single model onto each chip, with its systems now able to run any frontier AI model. Existing backers including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins also took part in the round.
- Etched raised $700m, now valued at $21 billion
- Valuation doubled in a month, led by Jane Street
- Chips built to speed up AI "inference" processing
New here? Start with this
AI chips are specialised processors that carry out the calculations needed to run artificial intelligence models. Inference is the stage when a trained model responds to a user’s prompt; making it faster and less costly can help companies serve more users.
Etched is a start-up that designs chips and sells them as part of complete computing systems. Its approach uses custom chips and connections between memory and processors to handle AI workloads, and its systems can run different leading models.
Investors and technology companies are backing new hardware as demand for AI services grows. Jane Street, a trading firm, tested Etched’s hardware and bought it, while venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins have also invested.
AI Art Business Celebrity Companies Culture Entertainment Technology