AI Chip Startup Etched Reaches $21B Valuation, Ships First Racks

AI chip startup Etched has raised $700 million in a new funding round, boosting its valuation to $21 billion, and has shipped its first AI accelerator racks to lead investor Jane Street. This milestone represents a significant step forward for specialized Transformer ASICs, demonstrating that dedicated hardware for large language model inference is transitioning from design to real-world data center deployment. Etched's "Sohu" chip hard-codes the transformer architecture directly into the silicon, offering massive throughput advantages for transformer models but lacking the flexibility to run non-transformer architectures.