Etched CEO Gavin Uberti said the startup is betting that as AI develops, most of the technology's power-hungry computing requirements will be filled by customized, hard-wired chips called ASICs.
Uberti and his co-founders are aware that it's a high-risk wager, and that they're going up against some of the most richly capitalized and competitive companies on the planet. While $120 million is a lot of money to raise in a series A, it's about how much Nvidia generates in revenue in half a day. Nvidia's sales have more than tripled annually for three consecutive quarters, topping $26 billion in the latest period.
Semiconductors have traditionally been one of the hardest industries for startups given the long development cycles, the significant capital required to build a chip and the need to engage with a limited number of manufacturing partners, such as "When ChatGPT came out, and Nvidia stock exploded, and especially when every other model coming out would be a transformer too, we found ourselves in the right place at the right time," Uberti said.
By specializing on transformers, which moves data in predictable ways from the chip to memory, Etched's Sohu chip can dedicate less space to memory and more to the kinds of transistors that define a chip's raw computing power, Uberti said.