College dropouts raise $120 million to take on Nvidia's AI chips

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A team founded by college dropouts has raised $120 million from investors led by Primary Venture Partners to build a new AI chip to take on Nvidia.

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.

Co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said that as AI develops, most of the technology's power-hungry computing requirements will be filled by customized, hard-wired chips called ASICs. Their efficiency comes in executing only the AI model they were designed to perform, in contrast to general purpose graphics processing units from Nvidia that are more capable but are also much costlier.

Nvidia has more than 80% of the market share for AI chips, according to estimates. Etched is among a group of startups attracting capital to go after the burgeoning opportunity. Primary Venture Partners led the round. Peter Thiel, Stanley Druckenmiller and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt are also backers. Venture capitalists invested $6 billion in AI semiconductor companies in 2023, up slightly from $5.7 billion in 2022, according to data from PitchBook.Uberti and Chris Zhu started to work on a chip company after Uberti did a summer internship working on compliers. That put him in contact with the low-level hardware ideas that led to Etched.

Etched is preparing to bring Sohu to market, and the founders say they'll be ready to show something later this year. The startup is also working to secure customers and says that technology companies are eager to check out new AI chips. Another aspect of Eteched's efficiency is that the chip has one large core. That results in fewer inefficient calculations done by a part called a streaming multiprocessor to coordinate calculations by different cores.

 

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College dropouts raise $120 million to take on Nvidia's AI chipsA team founded by college dropouts has raised $120 million from investors led by Primary Venture Partners to build a new AI chip to take on Nvidia.
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