AI chip startup Etched has raised $700 million in a new funding round, pushing its valuation to $21 billion. What’s striking is how quickly the valuation moved: it was valued at $10.3 billion in July, meaning the company more than doubled its valuation in less than a month. Etched is developing specialized AI inference hardware designed to make running AI models faster and more cost-efficient. The funding round was led by Jane Street, with participation from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global. The bigger question for me is whether the AI infrastructure market is starting to shift from simply buying more GPUs toward specialized hardware optimized for inference. Etched already says it has more than $1 billion in customer contracts, but semiconductor history also has plenty of examples of technically impressive chips that struggled to become major businesses. Do you think specialized AI inference chips can seriously challenge Nvidia’s dominance, or will GPUs remain the default for most AI workloads? submitted by /u/Pablomiller
Originally posted by u/Pablomiller on r/ArtificialInteligence