Etched exited stealth today with a rack-scale inference system, $800M raised, and more than $1B in signed customer contracts. Their chips are working after a successful A0 (first-try) silicon tapeout. Their frontier inference clusters are co-designed throughout the stack for prefill and decode workloads. The team's announcement can be seen here.
Etched made two critical decisions to architect their system to be massively performant across both prefill and decode: Low Voltage Inference (LVI) enables an order of magnitude throughput in the same energy footprint as existing hardware while their Cluster Scale Memory (CSM) is a novel memory subsystem that allows for extremely fast latencies for users.
Investors include Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, and Two Sigma backed Etched, as well as VentureTech Alliance, a strategic partner of TSMC. Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li are also on the cap table.
Etched has grown from a team of college dropouts to 400+ people assembled from NVIDIA, Broadcom, Google TPU, and SK Hynix.
We’ve been lucky to be backers of Etched since their seed round in March 2023. We wanted to share some reflections on the journey to now.
Friday extended the two-day retreat from Wednesday's record-earnings peak, leaving Micron 11% off its $1,213 all-time high. The Q3 print was strong — $41.5B revenue, gross margins above 81%, $50B Q4 guide — but Friday reflected sector-wide repricing of AI infrastructure cost assumptions following the TSMC hike disclosure.
Friday extended the retreat from May's $235 all-time high, now 21% off the peak. The session decline was sector-driven — likely TSMC advanced-node cost repricing, not Nvidia-specific news.
SK Hynix is targeting a $29B Nasdaq ADR, with subscription opening July 14 and listing targeting July 10, priced at approximately $166 per ADR per HSBC's analysis. At target size, it would be the largest US semiconductor offering on record. The timing places a second large-cap HBM-exposed memory name in US markets precisely as memory sector valuations reprice downward from their June highs.