Etched, a startup developing chips designed to run artificial-intelligence models, is in talks to raise money at a valuation of roughly $20 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by Investing.com and Techmeme.
The company is also raising capital in a separate round at a $10 billion valuation, led by the venture-capital firm Sequoia, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reporting describes the details as coming from unnamed sources.
Etched builds so-called inference chips. In the AI world, "inference" refers to the stage where a trained model actually does its job — answering a question, generating text or images — as opposed to the earlier, compute-heavy "training" phase. Companies are racing to make this everyday running of AI models faster and cheaper, and a growing number of startups are trying to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware with chips tailored to specific tasks.
The two simultaneous fundraising efforts at different valuations — one near $20 billion and one at $10 billion — are unusual, though the source items do not explain how the two rounds relate to each other or what Etched plans to do with the money.
Why it matters: the eye-catching valuations signal that investors are betting heavily not just on building AI models, but on the specialized silicon needed to run them at scale, deepening the competition to power the next phase of the AI boom.