Etched, an AI chipmaker and competitor to Nvidia, said Tuesday that it has secured $1 billion in contract orders for its full-system products powered by its proprietary chips.
The company is currently testing its first product with customers. Etched describes the systems as “frontier inference clusters” — integrated bundles that combine its chips with custom-designed racks and software to help frontier AI models perform inference faster, at lower cost, and with greater power efficiency.
Etched, which was founded in 2022, also said that it has raised a total of $800 million to date. The company mentioned that the most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December 2025 at a $5 billion post-money valuation.
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Etched has attracted a number of investors, including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, and Stripes, who led the $500 million round. Angel investors, including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu also invested in the company, as did billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel.
“Our approach from the beginning has been to build for gigawatt-scale,” said Rob Wachen, co-founder of Etched. “Production is the product. We are living through one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, and the companies that matter will be the ones that can translate technology into systems that can be manufactured, deployed, and operated at massive scale. We’re as focused on operations as we are on frontier research.”
According to a statement by Etched, the company has assembled a team of more than 400 people, with most of the company coming from Nvidia, Broadcom, Google TPU, SK Hynix, HFT quant firms and other organizations responsible for building the systems powering today’s inference. Inference refers to the process that happens after a user submits a prompt. It is currently considered the biggest bottleneck, and the biggest cost center for AI companies trying to serve customers at scale.
Although the press release said Etched has just emerged from stealth mode, co-founders and CEO Gavin Uberti and President Robert Wachen have been discussing the company’s chip strategy publicly since 2024, including in interviews with TechCrunch.
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Etched has attracted investor attention since 2024, when it raised more than $125 million. The founders said on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s “Invest Like the Best” podcast that they initially struggled to generate investor interest when they launched the company in 2023.
The company’s fortunes had changed with the hype around AI. Investors are now chasing everything AI-related, especially chip technology that speeds up inference. AI chipmaker Groq recently raised $650 million, while Cerebras, another chip company, had the first breakout IPO of the year.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI unveiled the “Jalapeño” chip in an attempt to reduce dependence on Nvidia. This chip was developed in partnership with semiconductor giant Broadcom and is designed specifically for AI inference