Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month
Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month
Etched 估值在一个月内翻倍至 210 亿美元
Etched on Tuesday announced that it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street after the famed quant fund tested and bought the startup’s AI hardware. Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December. It raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July. Now investors have doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion, in a month.
Etched 周二宣布，在知名量化基金 Jane Street 测试并购买了该初创公司的 AI 硬件后，由其领投，公司又筹集了 7 亿美元，估值达到 210 亿美元。即便以 AI 行业的标准来看，这种估值增长速度也令人瞠目结舌。Etched 在去年 12 月的估值为 50 亿美元；今年 7 月，它以 103 亿美元的估值完成了 3 亿美元的 C 轮融资。如今，投资者在一个月内将其估值翻了一番，达到 210 亿美元，增长了近 110 亿美元。
Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls “frontier inference clusters.” (Etched competitor Nvidia calls its full systems AI factories.) Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that investors are so enthusiastic because Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference — the computing process that happens after a user submits a prompt.
Etched 以“前沿推理集群”（frontier inference clusters）的全套系统形式提供其 AI 技术。（Etched 的竞争对手英伟达将其全套系统称为 AI 工厂。）联合创始人兼首席运营官 Robert Wachen 对 TechCrunch 表示，投资者之所以如此热情，是因为 Etched 从零开始设计了两个新组件，旨在加速推理——即用户提交提示词后发生的计算过程。
“Inference is built in two stages,” Wachen said, “prefill and decode.” In the mathematically and compute-intensive “prefill phase,” the system must understand the prompt, including context. In the memory-intensive “decode” phase, the system generates output tokens, meaning the actual answer the user sees.
“推理分为两个阶段，”Wachen 说，“预填充（prefill）和解码（decode）。”在数学和计算密集型的“预填充阶段”，系统必须理解提示词，包括上下文。而在内存密集型的“解码阶段”，系统会生成输出标记（tokens），即用户看到的实际答案。
Etched created a prefill chip that operates at low voltage, allowing it to pack in more transistors without the typical heat problems of other high-end AI chips. It can therefore process more tokens faster. Etched created a new type of memory and an interconnect for the decode process that the company calls cluster-scale memory. “It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency,” Wachen said. The result, Etched promises, is higher speeds and lower costs.
Etched 开发了一种低电压运行的预填充芯片，使其能够在不产生其他高端 AI 芯片常见散热问题的情况下，集成更多的晶体管。因此，它能以更快的速度处理更多的标记。Etched 还为解码过程创建了一种新型内存和互连技术，公司称之为“集群级内存”（cluster-scale memory）。Wachen 表示：“它允许许多芯片连接在一起，并以极快、低延迟的方式使用共享内存池。”Etched 承诺，其结果是更高的速度和更低的成本。
Etched is still battling the perception from its early days that it etches a particular model into its chips, meaning that each chip is somehow custom-designed to run one frontier model. That was its original intention but is no longer the case. Etched’s systems can run any frontier model.
Etched 仍在努力消除其早期留下的刻板印象，即它将特定模型“刻”在芯片中，意味着每块芯片都是为运行单一前沿模型而定制的。那曾是其最初的意图，但现在情况已不再如此。Etched 的系统可以运行任何前沿模型。
In the blog post announcing the new round, investment firm Jane Street said, “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We’re excited to now have our own rack running in our datacenter.”
在宣布本轮融资的博客文章中，投资公司 Jane Street 表示：“我们测试了该芯片，并对早期结果感到满意。Etched 独特的推理方法提供了我们支持最严苛工作负载所需的精度。我们很高兴现在能在自己的数据中心运行我们自己的机架。”
Other investors in Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone.
Etched 的其他投资者包括 Kleiner Perkins、红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）、Andreessen Horowitz、Peter Thiel、老虎环球基金（Tiger Global）、Bain Capital Ventures、Neo、Stripes、Primary、Positive Sum、Diffusion、Argo 和黑石集团（Blackstone）。