Etched Hits $5B Valuation With $1B AI Chip Orders

Nvidia rival Etched has revealed $1 billion in contract orders for its AI inference chips and systems, alongside $800 million in total funding. The startup's latest $500 million round, closed in December, values it at $5 billion and attracted backers including Jane Street, Two Sigma, and angels like Geoffrey Hinton and Andrej Karpathy. Founded in 2022 by two Harvard dropouts, Etched targets AI inference — the costliest bottleneck for companies serving AI at scale. The company struggled to raise money in 2023 but now operates in a transformed funding landscape, competing alongside Cerebras, Groq, and in-house chip efforts from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.