Etched, co-founded by Gavin Uberti and Rob Wachen, secured approximately $800 million in funding, backed by over $1 billion in customer demand, to build a complete AI inference solution including custom chips, boards, power delivery, interconnect, and a mass-production factory. The company's strategy focuses on vertical integration, low-voltage inference, and cluster-scale memory to maximize token capacity online. Etched aims to become the most valuable company by producing the most AI tokens, forecasting a shift to measuring productivity as 'agents per megawatt' by 2027.
A new vertically integrated player with significant funding and customer demand is entering the AI inference market, intensifying competition for NVIDIA's GPU dominance.