There’s another new startup aiming to disrupt artificial intelligence chip manufacturing. And they have some of the largest angel investors in the world behind them.
What’s happening:
- Artificial intelligence chip manufacturing startup Etched has raised $120M USD in a Series A financing round
- The round was led by Primary Ventures Partners and Positive Sum Ventures, with notable angel investors including Peter Thiel, Stanley Druckenmiller and Mike Novogratz also participating
Why it matters:
- The importance of artificial intelligence chips has led to a meteoric rise in share price for companies such as Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and a boom in funding for everything from data centres to semiconductor startups
The big idea:
- Etched is building their hardware around the vision that the next evolution for artificial intelligence computing needs will be powered by ASICs
- ASICs chips are integrated circuit chips which are customized for specific uses rather than general purposes
- Etched’s flagship chip which is known as Sohu, which is is an ASIC chip purpose built only to train the artificial intelligence models they were designed to perform on versus GPUs which have more capabilities but also significantly more costs
Going deeper:
- Artificial intelligence cloud computing has continued to see a significant acceleration in demand, leading asset management giant Coatue to recently invest in a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company to expand their infrastructure to host more GPUs and CoreWeave to raise billions of dollars in new venture capital funding
- Etched has partnered with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) to actually build and manufacture their chips
