Etched was founded in 2022 by Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu, and emerged from stealth in June of this year.
AI hardware start-up Etched has raised $700m in a new funding round led by US trading firm Jane Street, which the start-up said boosted its valuation to $21bn – doubling in less than a month.
Etched builds inference clusters to make AI inference – essentially the process of using a trained AI model to make predictions on new data – faster, cheaper and more efficient. To do this, according to the start-up, it co-designs chips, racks, software and manufacturing methods.
The start-up said it uses two central technologies to power its inference clusters: low-voltage inference, which it said delivers higher compute density within the same power as existing hardware, and cluster scale memory, a hybrid memory subsystem that creates a “massive” shared memory pool across an entire cluster rather than a single chip.
As well as leading the funding round, Jane Street has also become Etched’s first customer. Etched shipped its hardware rack to the company last month after it tested the start-up’s inference hardware.
“We’ve felt the urgency to get our hardware into customers’ hands and run real workloads since day one. Jane Street putting this cluster into production is proof of what we’ve built,” said Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched.
“Now, we’re sprinting on scaling production for the rest of our customers.”
As well as deploying its first rack to Jane Street, Etched said it has also secured more than $1bn in customer contracts across industries including public and private “frontier” AI companies and clouds.
Other participants in the latest funding round include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo and Blackstone.
Sequoia previously led Etched’s $300m Series C round last month, after which the start-up was reportedly valued at $10.3bn.
Etched was founded in 2022 by Harvard Thiel fellows Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu. The start-up, which currently has a team of 400 employees, emerged from stealth in June of this year.
It is the latest emerging challenger to Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market, and has reportedly been recruiting “aggressively” from the tech giant, according to the Wall Street Journal, which said that around 15pc of Etched’s current team previously worked at the tech giant.
“Under 1pc of the world has access to frontier models. Scaling intelligence requires a new kind of inference hardware,” wrote the start-up in a blogpost announcing its latest funding.
“As we ramp to gigawatt scale, we’ll face a new set of challenges: building new factories, global supply chains, fleet software, self-improving kernel agents and more.”
The demand for semiconductors is more heightened than ever, with chipmakers across the world surging in value, while shortages sparked by unprecedented demand continue to threaten supply chains across the tech world.
Just last week, ChangXin Memory Technologies, a Chinese manufacturer of dynamic random-access memory chips, replaced Tencent as the world’s most valuable Chinese company.
Earlier this month, AI giant Anthropic confirmed previously rumoured plans to design its own chips in response to a worldwide shortage and increased pressure to develop faster, more advanced AI systems.
In Ireland, tech giant Intel recently announced a major €5bn investment in its Kildare facility, which the company said will strengthen Ireland’s semiconductor ecosystem.
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