The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has raised US$800 million in total, including a US$500 million round in December at a US$5-billion valuation. Investors include TSMC-linked VentureTech Alliance; trading firms like Jane Street and Two Sigma; AI lab CEOs, including Cohere’s Aidan Gomez, World Labs’s Fei-Fei Li and Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch; and prominent Canadian computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Andrej Karpathy. (The Logic)

Talking point: Etched makes chips and hardware for inference—the process of running frontier AI models and the widely used tools built on top of them—faster and cheaper than existing infrastructure. Near neighbour Nvidia became the AI boom’s biggest winner by selling the semiconductors that power the training of these systems. Etched joins several startups chasing the market for inference, which promises to be even bigger. The firm has been quietly working on its hardware since 2023, and claims it already has a working chip that it’s designing server racks around, as well as US$1 billion worth of contracts for them.