Etched created new chips to compete with NVIDIA's startapi

In the AI chip market, startup Etched reported progress in its effort to challenge NVIDIA's dominance, according to Zamin.uz.

The young company said its first chips, manufactured at TSMC facilities, passed successful testing and that it has now accumulated orders worth one billion dollars. Such high figures indicate that the startup's technological capabilities are gaining recognition from major investors and influential clients.

International outlets have reported on the development in detail. Etched refers to its products as specialized computing systems.

These are not just individual chips, but integrated systems that include specialized server hardware and complex software. The company claims these systems will enable AI models to respond to queries much faster, cheaper, and more energy-efficiently than competitors.

At the same time, these solutions are being tested in practice by early customers. In the AI field, the process of inference—or generating responses—is considered the most critical stage.

Currently, this stage represents the largest expense and primary technical bottleneck for technology companies. Etched has attracted significant market attention by focusing on solving exactly this problem.

The startup's founders, Gevin Uberti and Robert Vachen, even paused their influential studies at Harvard University to bring their ideas to life. The company completed a major investment round last year, raising its overall market valuation to five billion dollars.

To date, the total amount of funding attracted has surpassed eight hundred million dollars—a strong financial signal for new entrants in a market dominated by giants like NVIDIA.

Interestingly, just a year ago, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, as investors favored universal graphics processors over specialized chips. Today, the situation has completely changed, and other companies involved in AI chip manufacturing have also come into the spotlight.

For example, firms like Cerebras and Groq have also succeeded in attracting substantial investments. Even tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are working on developing their own custom chips.

OpenAI's announcement of its own specialized chip shows how intense the competition in this field has become. The success of startups like Etched is expected to lead to a complete transformation of AI infrastructure in the future.