Etched

Etched is a startup building specialized AI chips called 'transformer ASICs,' hardwired specifically to run transformer-based AI models like those underlying ChatGPT, rather than general-purpose GPUs.

Etched was founded by Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen, pursuing a distinctive and notably specialized approach to AI chip design based on the observation that the transformer architecture, the foundational neural network design underlying nearly all of today's leading large language models including GPT and Claude, has become so dominant and stable across the AI industry that a chip built to run only that specific architecture, rather than a more flexible, general-purpose chip like Nvidia's GPUs, could achieve dramatically better performance and efficiency for transformer-based AI workloads specifically, at the cost of losing the flexibility to run other types of AI models. Etched's core bet is that transformer-based models will remain the dominant AI architecture for long enough to justify designing chips, called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, hardwired specifically around that one architecture rather than the more flexible, programmable design of general-purpose GPUs, a strategy that carries meaningful technical risk if the AI industry shifts toward substantially different model architectures before Etched's specialized chips reach the market and achieve meaningful commercial adoption, but that could offer substantial performance and cost advantages if the transformer architecture's continued dominance holds. The company's chip, called Sohu, is designed specifically to run inference for large language models at significantly higher throughput and lower cost than general-purpose GPU alternatives for that specific workload. Etched has raised substantial venture funding from investors including Primary Venture Partners and various prominent individual technology investors, reaching a valuation in the billions of dollars, competing indirectly with Nvidia's dominant GPU platforms and other specialized AI inference chip startups including Groq.

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