Etched secures $1 billion in orders for AI chip system—inference-optimized accelerators competing with Nvidia.
Etched, an AI chipmaker competing against Nvidia, announced Tuesday that it has secured $1 billion in contract orders for its full-system products powered by its proprietary chips. The company is currently testing its first product with customers. Etched describes these systems as "frontier inference clusters"—integrated bundles combining its chips with custom-designed racks and software to enable frontier AI models to perform inference faster, at lower cost, and with greater power efficiency.
Founded in 2022, Etched has raised $800 million to date. The most recent funding round, completed in December 2025, brought in $500 million at a $5 billion post-money valuation. This round was led by Stripes, with participation from VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, and Ribbit Capital. The company's angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu, as well as billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel.
"Our approach from the beginning has been to build for gigawatt-scale," said Rob Wachen, co-founder of Etched. "Production is the product. We are living through one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, and the companies that matter will be the ones that can translate technology into systems that can be manufactured, deployed, and operated at massive scale. We're as focused on operations as we are on frontier research."
Etched has assembled a team of more than 400 people, largely drawn from Nvidia, Broadcom, Google TPU, SK Hynix, high-frequency trading quant firms, and other organizations building today's inference infrastructure. Inference—the process occurring after a user submits a prompt—is currently the largest bottleneck and cost center for AI companies serving customers at scale.
Though Etched recently emerged from stealth mode, co-founders and CEO Gavin Uberti and President Robert Wachen had been discussing the company's chip strategy publicly since 2024, including in TechCrunch interviews.
Etched has generated investor interest since 2024, when it raised over $125 million. The founders initially struggled to attract investment when launching in 2023, but their fortunes shifted with the AI boom. Investors now aggressively pursue AI-related opportunities, particularly chip technology accelerating inference. Groq, a competing AI chipmaker, recently raised $650 million, while Cerebras achieved the year's first breakout chip IPO.
In parallel, OpenAI unveiled the "Jalapeño" chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia. Developed in partnership with Broadcom, this chip targets AI inference specifically.