Etched Raises $300M Series C at $10B Valuation with $1B in Pre-Orders

AI chip startup Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, led by Sequoia with participation from A16Z, Jane Street, Blackstone, and SK Hynix. The company has already secured $1 billion in pre-orders and is now shipping inference racks this summer from its San Jose headquarters and newly opened 10 MW Milpitas data center.

Etched's competitive edge centers on low-voltage inference (LVI)—running math engine transistors at under half the voltage of competing AI chips, which reduces thermal throttling and enables 80%+ utilization on trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts models. President Robert Wachen claims the approach unlocks 2–3x the world's inference capacity if adopted industry-wide, with customers already seeing results 'significantly better than anything on the market' in remote testing.

The startup—founded by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu with Robert Wachen—has evolved from early ideas of hardcoding models into silicon toward a more flexible stack. Etched is vertically integrated across ASIC design, custom packaging, board design, cooling, and server infrastructure, with over 450 employees. The team declined to publish performance figures publicly, citing competitive sensitivity.

For architects, Etched's raises matter as a signal that private capital now funds chip-design margins at scale. The $1B pre-order book and focus on serving 'the biggest AI companies' (not startups) shows consolidation logic: token-hungry inference workloads are flowing toward specialized silicon, moving cost pressure upstream from Nvidia's data-center franchises.