AI Chip Startup Etched Raises $500M at $5B Valuation to Challenge NVIDIA on Inference

Summary

AI chip startup Etched closed a $500 million funding round at a $5 billion valuation on January 14, 2026, bringing total funding to nearly $1 billion. The round was led by Stripes, with participation from Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, Ribbit Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. Etched is developing Sohu, a transformer-only application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) built on TSMC's 4nm process that the company claims delivers 10-20x better performance-per-watt and raw throughput compared to general-p