NVIDIA's strong competitor in the AI chip industry, startup Etched, has emerged from stealth mode and announced its latest developments. Its dedicated chip system, successfully manufactured by TSMC earlier this year, has secured a $1 billion contract order.

The system, called "Frontier Inference Cluster," integrates custom chips, racks, and supporting software, and is now in the customer testing phase. Designed to address the biggest cost bottleneck faced by the AI industry when serving large-scale customers, this system aims to run cutting-edge models at speeds far exceeding general-purpose GPUs while significantly reducing energy consumption and costs through hardware-level hardcoding.

GPU Chip (3)

The startup, founded in 2022, also revealed that it secretly completed a $500 million funding round last December, bringing its total fundraising to $800 million, and its valuation surged to $5 billion. This round was led by Stripes, and it attracted investments from VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, as well as industry giants such as Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Peter Thiel.