Artificial intelligence (AI) chip startup, Etched, has raised a total of $800 million, with investors including trading firm Jane Street and VentureTech Alliance, a venture capital firm with a strategic partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), according to Bloomberg.The company, which is developing AI inference chips to compete with Nvidia, said it plans to begin shipping chips to select customers this summer.Etched had previously raised a $500 million funding round at a $5 billion valuation. That round, which closed in December, was led by investment firm Stripes and included participation from Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, Ribbit Capital, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma and VentureTech Alliance.Etched co-founder and president Robert Wachen said Jane Street also led an earlier, previously undisclosed funding round and has invested additional capital since then. According to people familiar with the matter, the trading firm has invested more than $100 million in the startup.Founded in 2022, Etched designs chips specifically for running AI models. The company said it is currently testing its products and has secured sales contracts worth about $1 billion, although it did not disclose customer names.“We’ve been very quiet until we had stuff to show off,” co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Gavin Uberti said.Other investors include AI pioneer and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.Etched is among several startups seeking to challenge Nvidia as demand shifts from training AI models to inference—the process of running trained models in production.Working with TSMC, the company has developed what it calls low-voltage inference technology, enabling chips to operate at lower voltages to reduce overheating while delivering higher performance. It has also designed a memory architecture combining High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) to improve AI inference performance.Unlike many chip startups, Etched designs entire AI server racks, including circuit boards, cooling systems and networking infrastructure, rather than supplying chips alone.
