Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip
Nvidia competitor Etched hits $5B valuation, $1B in sales for AI chip
英伟达竞争对手 Etched 估值达 50 亿美元，AI 芯片销售额突破 10 亿美元
Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year. The startup says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its product: full systems powered by those chips. 在台积电于今年早些时候成功代工其芯片后，英伟达（Nvidia）的 AI 芯片竞争对手 Etched 于周二发布了一份进展报告。这家初创公司表示，其产品——由这些芯片驱动的完整系统——已获得 10 亿美元的合同订单。
Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers. It calls these systems “frontier inference clusters,” bundles that include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software, all built to help frontier models run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals, Etched claims. (Inference is what happens after a user submits a prompt — it’s currently the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest cost center for AI companies trying to serve customers at scale, which is exactly why investors are paying attention to anyone promising to solve it.) Etched 目前正在与客户测试其首款产品。该公司将这些系统称为“前沿推理集群”（frontier inference clusters），这是一套包含芯片、定制机架和软件的组合方案。Etched 声称，这些系统旨在帮助前沿模型以比竞争对手更快、更廉价且更节能的方式运行推理。（推理是指用户提交提示词后发生的过程——这目前是 AI 公司在大规模服务客户时面临的最大瓶颈和最大的成本中心，这也是为什么投资者如此关注任何承诺解决这一问题的人。）
Etched, founded in 2022, also revealed that it has now raised a total of $800 million to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said. 成立于 2022 年的 Etched 还透露，截至目前，公司已累计融资 8 亿美元。据公司称，最近的一笔融资是去年 12 月完成的 5 亿美元未公开轮次，投后估值达到 50 亿美元。
The startup has attracted a notable group of investors, too, including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, and Stripes, who led the $500 million round. It has also secured angel investment from AI heavyweights including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu. The cap table also includes billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel. 这家初创公司还吸引了一批知名投资者，包括 VentureTech Alliance、Jane Street、Hudson River Trading、Two Sigma、Ribbit Capital 以及领投了 5 亿美元融资的 Stripes。此外，它还获得了包括 Andrej Karpathy、Geoffrey Hinton、李飞飞（Fei-Fei Li）、Arthur Mensch 和 Scott Wu 在内的 AI 领域重量级人物的天使投资。其股东名单中还包括亿万富翁 Stanley Druckenmiller 和 Peter Thiel。
Although the startup’s press release frames Tuesday’s announcement as Etched “coming out of stealth,” co-founders — CEO Gavin Uberti (pictured above) and president Robert Wachen — have actually been talking to TechCrunch about their chip plans since 2024. Both dropped out of Harvard and became Thiel fellows to found Etched, as Uberti told TechCrunch at the time. By 2024, Etched was already on investors’ radar, having raised more than $125 million. 尽管该初创公司在新闻稿中将周二的公告描述为 Etched “走出隐身模式”，但联合创始人——首席执行官 Gavin Uberti（上图所示）和总裁 Robert Wachen——实际上自 2024 年起就一直在与 TechCrunch 讨论他们的芯片计划。正如 Uberti 当时告诉 TechCrunch 的那样，两人都从哈佛退学并成为 Thiel 奖学金获得者，从而创立了 Etched。到 2024 年，Etched 已经进入了投资者的视野，并已筹集了超过 1.25 亿美元。
But on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s “Invest Like the Best” podcast, the founders said that back in 2023, they struggled to get investors interested — even with a 30-page memo arguing that AI would eventually need specialized chips, not just general-purpose GPUs. Every major investor they pitched passed. The company was reportedly operating month-to-month, close to running out of cash, in those early days. 但在 Patrick O’Shaughnessy 的播客“Invest Like the Best”中，创始人表示，早在 2023 年，他们很难引起投资者的兴趣——尽管他们准备了一份 30 页的备忘录，论证 AI 最终将需要专用芯片，而不仅仅是通用 GPU。他们接触的每一位主要投资者都拒绝了。据报道，在早期阶段，公司只能按月维持运营，几乎耗尽了现金。
Today’s funding environment looks like a different planet by comparison. Investors are chasing everything AI-related, especially chip technology that speeds up inference. Competitor Cerebras had the first breakout IPO of the year, while AI chip maker Groq just raised $650 million. Hyperscalers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all build their own in-house AI chips. Even OpenAI just announced its first custom chip, built by Broadcom. 相比之下，今天的融资环境简直是另一个世界。投资者正在追逐一切与 AI 相关的事物，尤其是能加速推理的芯片技术。竞争对手 Cerebras 完成了今年首个突破性的 IPO，而 AI 芯片制造商 Groq 刚刚筹集了 6.5 亿美元。超大规模云服务商亚马逊、谷歌和微软都在构建自己的内部 AI 芯片。甚至 OpenAI 也刚刚宣布了其首款由博通（Broadcom）代工的定制芯片。