Harvard Dropouts Raise $120M in Series A to Challenge Nvidia with 20x Faster AI Chip, Sohu

Jun 25, 2024, 03:48 PM

Harvard dropouts behind the startup Etched have raised $120 million in a Series A funding round to challenge Nvidia in the AI chip market. The company aims to address the compute crunch in AI with their transformer-specific chip, Sohu. Investors, including Two Sigma Ventures and Thiel, are backing Etched, which claims their technology can run transformers at 500,000 tokens per second and replace 20 Nvidia H100 chips. The new chip promises to be 20 times faster and 10 times cheaper, potentially revolutionizing AI model training and applications. The chip is expected to operate at 1/20th the cost and could solve aging 100 times faster.