Nvidia Rival Etched Doubles Its Value to $10.3B in Seven Months
Etched, the chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has raised $300 million at a $10.3 billion valuation. It has doubled its worth in just seven months, with significant investment from memory giant SK Hynix, and aims to outperform Nvidia in artificial intelligence (AI) inference.
Key Points:
- Funding and Valuation: Etched secured $300 million in a Series C round, valuing the company at $10.3 billion. Sequoia led the investment, with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix also participating.
- Rapid Growth: The startup's valuation has surged from $5 billion in December to $10.3 billion in July, highlighting its rapid progress.
- Product Offering: Etched specializes in AI inference chips based on the transformer architecture, challenging Nvidia's dominance with a focused approach.
- Technical Advantages: They claim two key inventions: low-voltage inference for power efficiency and shared memory across multiple chips for faster memory access.
- Factory Setup: To meet demand, Etched has established an 80,000 sq. ft. facility near its San Jose base and a factory in Taiwan, hiring engineers from Nvidia, Broadcom, Google's TPU group, and SK Hynix.
Etched's mission is to revolutionize AI inference, challenging industry leaders with specialized, efficient chips.