Nvidia rival Etched raises $800M with backing from Jane Street and a TSMC-linked fund

AI chip startup Etched has raised $800M in total funding, with backers including trading firm Jane Street and TSMC-linked VentureTech Alliance. The company, founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts, has signed $1B in sales contracts and plans to ship its Sohu chip this summer. Sohu is purpose-built for transformer model inference, embedding the architecture directly into silicon rather than repurposing general-purpose GPUs. Etched also designed its full server rack — including cooling and networking — a first among chip startups. Notable investors include Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Stanley Druckenmiller. The inference chip market is seeing massive capital inflows as the industry shifts from training to running AI models at scale.