etched hits $21b valuation — and claims to beat nvidia on speed

etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation led by jane street, doubling its valuation from $10.3 billion in july. the startup produces full inference systems featuring a custom low-voltage prefill chip and cluster-scale memory interconnect to accelerate token generation. jane street invested after testing the hardware, citing the precision needed for its demanding workloads, signaling that specialized inference chips are increasingly critical for high-performance ai computing.