Briefs · Emerging Technologies
A Chip That Can Only Do One Thing Is Now Worth $21 Billion
A chip that can only do one thing is now worth $21 billion. The one thing is the only thing that matters.
Etched raised $700 million in August at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street — its first customer, which took delivery of its first rack in July. The product is Sohu, an ASIC that hard-wires the transformer architecture into silicon instead of running it as software on a GPU. Built on TSMC’s 4-nanometre process with 144GB of memory per chip, an eight-chip server claims 500,000 tokens a second on Llama 70B — the work of some 160 Nvidia H100s. Those are the company’s numbers; no independent benchmark exists yet.
The valuation staircase is vertiginous: $5 billion in December, $10.3 billion in July, $21 billion in August. Total funding now approaches $1.9 billion, against more than $1 billion in signed contracts.
Conclusion: Etched is not selling a chip, but rather a bet — that inference, done in silicon, is worth more than flexibility.
Summary in our own words. The original belongs to its publisher.