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Harvard Dropouts' Etched Raises $120M for Sohu AI Chip, 20x Faster than Nvidia

Jun 25, 2024, 06:02 PM

Etched, an artificial intelligence startup founded by Harvard dropouts, has raised $120 million in a Series A funding round to develop its specialized AI chip, Sohu. This funding brings Etched's total funding to $125.36 million. Sohu is an ASIC designed exclusively for transformer models, boasting the ability to process over 500,000 tokens per second with the Llama 70B model. The chip aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market by offering performance that is claimed to be 20 times faster and cheaper than Nvidia's H100 GPUs. The funding round was led by Primary Venture Partners and Two Sigma Ventures, with notable investors including Peter Thiel and the CEO of GitHub. Etched has also partnered with TSMC for manufacturing. An 8xSohu server can replace 160 H100s, positioning Sohu as a significant innovation in the AI hardware landscape, potentially reducing the cost and increasing the speed of AI model inference.