@Michaelzsguo: Today Etched made a high-profile entry into the public eye. What this company wants to do is not yet another GPU replacement, but an AI chip designed specifically for Transformer inference, along with a complete inference cluster. The investors and backers behind it are practically a Who’s Who of the AI industry…
Summary
Etched made a high-profile debut, announcing an AI chip and full inference cluster built specifically for Transformer inference. It has secured over $1 billion in customer contracts and $800 million in funding, with the first cabinet set to ship this summer.
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Today, Etched stepped into the public spotlight in a big way.
The company isn’t building just another GPU alternative — it’s designing an AI chip purpose-built for Transformer inference, along with a full inference cluster. Its backers and supporters read like a who’s who of the AI industry.
The co-founder and CTO is a 23-year-old Chinese-American named Chris Zhu. A Harvard dropout who took the legendary Math 55 and is also a Thiel Fellow.
A young man in his early twenties, coming from a math and high-performance computing background, directly entering the hardest track — AI inference chips. Backed by such strong capital and engineering teams.
The younger generation is formidable.
Etched (@Etched): We’re coming out of stealth.
We’ve built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.
Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.
Our first racks ship this summer.
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