/Tech3h ago

Hardware startup Etched raises $800 million and secures $1 billion in contracts for custom AI inference chips

The team delivered working inference racks within three years of design.

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#225

Original post

Tri Dao@tri_dao

It's wild how quickly Etched designed and got the chips out, all within 2 years. They went deep, hardcoding attention into silicon and getting very high MFU. This kind of hardware tailored made for LLM inference is soon gonna bring cost of intelligence down 10x

Etched@Etched

We're coming out of stealth.

We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.

Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.

Our first racks ship this summer.

8:10 AM · Jun 30, 2026 · 147.7K Views

Sentiment

Positive users celebrate Etched's fast hardware progress and $800M raise as validation of its approach, while negative users call the news overhyped shilling and question the risks of building custom AI chips.

Pos

82.3%

Neg

17.7%

18 comments with sentiment.

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Patrick OShaughnessy@patrick_oshag

.@paulg said the best predictor of startup success at every stage is how fast a company ships new things

I've watched Etched build an entire inference rack in about 3 years (which is insane)

I've never seen a team execute this fast on something this hard

"You win by shipping. You don't win by having the best outreach or communications, you win by having the best product.

The biggest risk is not taking risk.

Every day there's over a billion dollars in revenue in this category, and a lot of it's inference.

So every day we don't ship, we're just leaving tons of opportunity on the table.

A very famous AI chip company took 10 months to go from getting their silicon back to running inference in a rack. We did it in 40 days."

Patrick OShaughnessy@patrick_oshag

Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world.

Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible.

Today, Etched (@Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total raised, $1B in signed customer contracts, and a working next-gen AI chip.

This was my excuse to ask the two founders, @UbertiGavin and @robertwachen, every question I have about compute and inference.

We discuss: - Why they built an entire rack and not just a chip - The two technical bets behind their architecture no one else has tried - How two founders in their twenties recruited industry legends - The night they nearly ran out of money - Why whoever produces the most tokens wins

If you care about the future of compute, Gavin and Rob are two people to know. I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget.

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work 14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck 22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories 33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster 49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack 1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive 1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence

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the tiny corp@__tinygrad__

@tri_dao

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Gavin Uberti@UbertiGavin

@tri_dao Couldn’t have done it without you, Tri! Thanks for all your help getting to this point

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Botir Khaltaev@botirkhaltaevv

@tri_dao any other chip startups you bullish on?

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Robert Wachen@robertwachen

@tri_dao Thanks Tri! Been fun working together since the beginning

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LastBlueWhale@LastBlueWhale

@tri_dao I see someone say 10x in a completely unreasonable way and I sigh. Please hype shill with subtlety. Also how do you hardcore attention into silicon WITHOUT WASTING A SHIT TON OF THE SPACE ON THE CHIP!

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