Etched, an AI chip startup, has raised $120 million in a Series A funding round to accelerate the development and production of its specialized AI chips. The company’s founder and CEO, Gavin Uberti, believes their focused approach could challenge industry giants like NVIDIA.
Unlike versatile GPUs, Etched’s chips are designed exclusively for transformer models, a dominant architecture in AI. Uberti explained during an interview last month: “Our chips are different. They are only able to run this one very narrow class of model, which we call transformers. But when running these kinds of models, they are vastly more performant, more than 20 times higher throughput than 800 or so.”
This specialization allows Etched to achieve significant performance gains.
“We’re able to burn the transformer algorithm into the chip,” Uberti stated. “We’re building our own silicon and our own servers, and this enables us to get more than 20 times higher throughput in terms of output words per second for models like GPT or LAMA.”
Etched is betting on the continued dominance of transformer models in AI. Uberti noted: “Transformers used to be for just large language models, but other kinds of models like image generators and video generators used to be what called units. But that’s changed over the past year. It’s turned out that transformers work better than other kinds of models for generating images and videos, too.”
The substantial funding will primarily support manufacturing and scaling. “This is a capital-intensive business. A majority of our series is going to go into building these products and scaling up the business,” Uberti explained.
While Etched’s approach is risky, Uberti is confident in their strategy.
“We are very specialized, that we are inherently taking a bet on the transformer architecture,” he admited. “A lot of folks in the industry will say that just like transformers were invented, there could be something else on the horizon that’ll put us out of business. And we are gambling.”
With TSMC as their manufacturing partner and significant funding secured, Etched is poised to make waves in the AI chip industry, potentially reshaping the landscape dominated by versatile GPU makers.
