AI Hardware Startup Etched Reaches $10.3B Valuation Backed by SK Hynix
AI hardware startup Etched has secured a new round of funding, doubling its valuation to a staggering $10.3 billion. This significant financial boost comes with the backing of memory chip titan SK Hynix, placing Etched among the most closely monitored names in Silicon Valley.
The Series C funding round included contributions from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, and SK Hynix. This round raised $300 million in 2026, bringing Etched’s total funding to approximately $925.4 million. The company, the brainchild of former Harvard students Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, specializes in the creation of custom silicon processors. These processors are designed exclusively for AI inference workloads, a departure from the general-purpose GPUs that currently dominate the market.
Etched’s primary contention is that conventional GPUs are ill-suited for AI inference. They argue that these GPUs offer excessive raw compute and insufficient memory to meet the needs of modern large language models. Their proprietary CSM architecture aims to minimize data movement between chips, thereby reducing latency and power consumption during inference tasks. CEO Robert Wachen has confirmed the opening of a new 80,000 sq ft, 10 MW production facility near Milpitas, California. The funding will be used to expedite the production of rack-scale inference clusters. The company has also reported customer demand exceeding $1 billion and has set up manufacturing operations in Taiwan.
Etched’s systems are engineered to support large language models, mixture-of-experts architectures, and alternative model types such as Mamba. This positions the company as a credible contender to Nvidia’s dominance in the AI infrastructure sector.
Source: TechRadar — Nvidia rival Etched secures SK Hynix backing at $10B valuation