The San Jose, Calif.-based startup Etched has raised US$800 million in total, including a US$500 million round in December at a US$5-billion valuation, as of a June 30, 2026 briefing. Investors include TSMC-linked VentureTech Alliance; trading firms Jane Street and Two Sigma; AI lab CEOs Cohere’s Aidan Gomez, World Labs’s Fei-Fei Li and Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch; and computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Andrej Karpathy. Etched makes chips and hardware for inference—running frontier AI models and tools—faster and cheaper than existing infrastructure. The firm has been working on its hardware since 2023, claims it already has a working chip that it’s designing server racks around, and has US$1 billion worth of contracts for them.