Etched
An American chip startup building processors that run only transformer models, aiming to make AI far cheaper to operate.
Etched is a chip company based in San Jose that designs hardware for one purpose: running transformer models, the architecture behind essentially every well-known AI system. Rather than competing with Nvidia on general-purpose graphics cards, it builds application-specific chips with the transformer design burned into the silicon, betting that giving up flexibility buys enough speed and efficiency to be worth it.
The company has been one of the fastest-rising valuations in AI hardware, moving from around 5 billion dollars in December 2025 to 21 billion by August 2026. Its first customer was the trading firm Jane Street, which also led its largest funding round.