AI chip startup Etched raises $800M, emerges from stealth with working inference chip and $1B in customer contracts

AI chip startup Etched has emerged from stealth, announcing its custom "Sohu" inference chip built on TSMC's N4P process. Founded by Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, the company has raised $800 million—including a $500 million round valuing it at $5 billion—backed by Jane Street, VentureTech Alliance, and AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton. Etched has secured over $1 billion in customer contracts and is ramping production toward gigawatt-scale by 2027.

Etched $800M funding rounds

• ▪Jane Street led a previously unannounced funding round for Etched and has invested more than $100 million in the company in total
• ▪Etched raised a total of $800 million across multiple financing rounds, including a $500 million round in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation

Working inference chip launch

• ▪Etched emerged from stealth on June 30, 2026, announcing a working inference chip designed to make AI inference faster and cheaper
• ▪Etched's inference chip, called Sohu, runs transformer models by embedding the architecture directly into silicon and utilizing low-voltage inference

$1B customer contracts signed

• ▪Etched has signed over $1 billion in customer contracts and plans to begin shipping its systems to customers in the summer of 2026
• ▪Etched is validating its first rack-scale product with customers, running models including DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama

TSMC N4P silicon success

• ▪Etched co-designed its entire server rack, including circuit boards, cooling plates, and networking connections, alongside the chip itself
• ▪Etched achieved first-pass (A0) silicon success on TSMC's N4P process in under three years from its seed funding

Gigawatt-scale production ramp

• ▪Etched is ramping production of its rack-scale system at a Taiwan factory and has established a data center and prototyping lab in San Jose
• ▪Etched has assembled a team of more than 400 employees, with a path to reaching gigawatt-scale operations in 2027

Strategic investor partnerships

• ▪Etched's strategic investors include VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Stripes, and Ribbit Capital
• ▪Prominent AI and finance figures investing in Etched include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Stanley Druckenmiller, Andrej Karpathy, and Arthur Mensch