Organisation
Etched
Building "Sohu", a chip specialised for the transformer architecture, betting that a fixed-function design beats general-purpose GPUs on inference speed and cost.
Etched is a US chip start-up, founded in 2022 by the Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, that is building a processor called Sohu specialised for a single AI architecture — the transformer that underlies most large language models. Its pitch is that hard-wiring the architecture into silicon yields far faster and cheaper inference than general-purpose GPUs; the corresponding risk, which the company acknowledges, is that a chip built for one architecture becomes obsolete if the field moves on. Etched came out of stealth in mid-2026 saying it had a working chip, had raised over $1bn in total, and had signed more than $1bn in customer contracts.
- Category
- Compute, chips & infrastructure
- Founded
- 2022
- HQ
- Cupertino, US
- Funding
- Over $1bn raised; reported ~$5bn valuation (late 2025)
- Key people
- Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu