AI chip startup Etched has announced a cumulative $800 million in funding, valuing the company at $5 billion, and secured a $1 billion chip order. Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts, Etched is developing specialized chips designed exclusively for running Transformer architectures, aiming to significantly improve efficiency and reduce costs compared to general-purpose GPUs. Their first chip, Sohu, manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process, has successfully completed its tape-out and reportedly offers a 20x throughput improvement and 140x better performance per dollar than NVIDIA's H100 for Llama 70B inference, without requiring developers to rewrite code. AI
IMPACT This development could signal a shift towards specialized AI hardware, potentially reducing reliance on general-purpose GPUs and lowering inference costs for large language models.
RANK_REASON Significant funding round and large order for a specialized AI chip company challenging a dominant player. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]
- AMD
- Andrej Karpathy
- AWS
- Cerebras
- Etched
- Geoffrey Hinton
- Groq
- Jane Street
- Llama 70B
- Meta
- Nvidia
- OpenAI
- Peter Thiel
- PyTorch
- Sohu
- Transformer
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