Partnering with Etched: Building the Inference Machine

Inference is on the path to becoming the largest market in the world.

If this AI dream is everything we hope it to be – and so far, the signs point to ever-increasing acceleration of capabilities – then inference will power every storefront, every movie, every medical encounter, every video game, every lawsuit, every line of code.

Today, the inference market is so obviously large that building an inference-specific system is consensus. Back in 2022, when Gavin, Chris, and Rob were still in their dorm rooms at Harvard, that bet was deeply contrarian. The result: Etched is the only post-ChatGPT-era hardware startup with production-ready custom silicon, ready to ship in 2026. 

Over the past years, Etched has pioneered several research breakthroughs – low voltage inference and cluster-scale memory – each a hard-won architectural choice that drives step-change gains in throughput and latency. As the unit of compute has moved from the chip to the rack to the cluster, Etched has designed for that reality, building not just chips, but cluster-scale inference systems. Driven by these fundamental innovations, Etched’s inference system excels in throughput and interactivity on the full span of frontier models – from large sparse MoEs, to dense transformers, to alternative architectures entirely, like Mamba. 

Believing this is one thing. Building it is another entirely. Novel computing hardware is among the hardest things in the world to get right, and the ground underneath is constantly moving. Models change every few weeks, context lengths stretch, attention gets reinvented, the mix of dense and sparse keeps shifting. Winning here means doing two things simultaneously: iterating fast enough to keep pace with the models, and pushing the frontier of what the hardware can do. That takes a rare kind of team: visionary enough to create the right designs, young enough to move fast, proven enough to have chips in production, and built to do this for decades, not a single tape-out.

Walking into the Etched office for the first time is like a bolt of lightning. Go in the morning or at 11 p.m. – the energy is the same, and it is infectious. Gavin and Rob are the kind of outliers both daring enough to design silicon from first principles and bold enough to knock down every obstacle in their path, and the team they have assembled matches them. We have watched them do the things that separate those who merely talk about hardware from those who ship it: standing up a live lab in San Jose to host their first racks; opening an office in Taiwan to colocate with suppliers and expedite testing; questioning every single assumption for what is possible, such as low voltage inference. “Production is the product” is the company’s mantra. Shipping is all that matters. 

The company’s progress has been rapid. Earlier this year, Etched taped out its first generation chip at TSMC, making it the first post-ChatGPT-era company with a successful full-reticle A0 chip tape-out on TSMC’s leading-edge nodes. Then, in a span of just 40 days, the Etched team brought up their first cluster of chips to run inference on a wide range of frontier AI models, achieving Pareto dominant performance on industry-standard throughput-interactivity curves. Now, Etched’s earliest customers are getting access to the product, seeing for themselves the speed, throughput, and expressiveness of the system. 

Etched has built a beautiful machine in Gen 1. We expect it will do very well in the market. But we are partnering with Etched because we believe they have built the rarest thing in this industry: the machine that builds the machine. This is a team that has the taste and the relentless execution to keep shipping the next generation of inference machines, faster and more ambitious each time.

The intelligence race is fundamentally compute constrained. Pushing the limits of physics to deliver the maximum intelligence per flop is both an insanely fun engineering and operations problem, and an incredibly noble mission for humanity.

We are delighted to be partnering with Etched and leading their $300 Million Series C at a $10 Billion pre-money valuation, joined by our friends at Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion, and SK Hynix.