Etched Doubles Valuation to $10.3B with Fresh Funding Round

Nvidia has a new challenger in the specialized chip market for AI inference. Etched, a company based in San Jose, California, has more than doubled its valuation in just four weeks with a fresh round of funding.

The latest investment was led by Jane Street, and also included Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global. This brings the total amount raised by Etched since its founding to $1.9 billion.

Etched's purpose-built systems are designed for AI inference tasks, which involve processing requests and generating responses from trained models. The company claims that its equipment can complete this work faster and at a lower cost than hardware designed for broader computing tasks.

The market is currently dominated by Nvidia's graphics processing units, but Etched and other specialized chipmakers are focusing on the efficiency of AI output. This involves measuring performance in terms of tokens produced per dollar and per watt.