Nvidia rival Etched raises $800M with backing from Jane Street and a TSMC-linked fund

Etched announced Tuesday it has raised $800 million across undisclosed funding rounds and secured more than $1 billion in signed customer contracts, the San Jose company said. The most recent round, a $500 million financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation, closed in December. Backers include Peter Thiel, trading firms Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading and Two Sigma, and venture investors Stripes, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary and Positive Sum. A strategic investment came from VentureTech Alliance, a fund tied to TSMC. Individual backers include Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Stanley Druckenmiller, Arthur Mensch and Scott Wu. The company builds frontier inference clusters for running AI models. Its first silicon, an A0 design, worked on the first pass on TSMC's N4P process. Etched says it is validating its first rack-scale product with customers, with systems running DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba and Llama. Co-founder and chief executive Gavin Uberti said the company recognized early that infrastructure to serve frontier AI models sustainably did not exist. Co-founder Rob Wachen said the approach has been to build for gigawatt-scale and that production is the product. Etched says it has stood up a factory in Taiwan and built a data center, test house and prototyping lab in San Jose. The team exceeds 400 people drawn from Nvidia, Broadcom, Google's TPU program, SK Hynix and high-frequency trading firms. Shipments are due this summer.