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Start Learning Free📋About Etched
Updated July 1, 2026Etched is an American AI-chip startup founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, headquartered in Cupertino, California. The company designs Sohu, a chip it calls the first purpose-built for the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models. Rather than the general-purpose flexibility of a GPU, Sohu hard-wires the matrix-multiplication patterns specific to transformer inference — fabricated on TSMC's 4-nanometer process — a bet that trading flexibility for specialization yields far better speed and cost on the one workload that now dominates AI compute. Etched sells both the chips and full frontier inference clusters that pair them with custom racks and software. It has booked more than $1 billion in orders and is backed by Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, and Ribbit Capital, with angel investment from Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, and Peter Thiel. It competes with Nvidia's inference GPUs as well as Cerebras and Groq.
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Sohu is Etched's transformer-specialized inference ASIC — a chip that hard-wires the transformer architecture on TSMC 4nm for far higher speed and lower cost than general-purpose GPUs on large-language-model inference.