Nvidia rival Etched raises $800M from Jane Street and TSMC partner venture fund

AI chip startup Etched, called a competitor to Nvidia, has raised $800 million; the list of investors includes trading firm Jane Street and venture fund VentureTech Alliance, which has a strategic partnership with Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC.

Who invested in Etched

Etched's round stands out for its investor composition: in addition to specialized venture funds, trading company Jane Street joined the deal, as well as VentureTech Alliance — a fund with a strategic partnership with TSMC.

• Round size — $800 million
• Among investors — trading firm Jane Street
• Second investor — VentureTech Alliance, a fund with a strategic partnership with TSMC
• Etched claims signed contracts for chip sales worth $1 billion

How Etched chips differ from Nvidia

Etched develops chips not for training AI models, but specifically for inference — that is, for running them and delivering answers to end users. This distinguishes the company from Nvidia, whose GPUs are used for both training and inference, and places Etched alongside a growing number of startups betting on specialized hardware specifically for deploying models to production.

Why the inference chip market is growing

Until recently, the main battleground for AI chips was training large models, where Nvidia holds overwhelming dominance. But as companies transition from one-time model training to continuous deployment — serving millions of user requests, enabling agentic scenarios, and growing volumes of so-called test-time compute, when a model spends more time "thinking" before responding — the cost and efficiency of inference became a separate expense line item, comparable in importance to training. Against this backdrop, over the past couple of years, an entire layer of startups specializing in inference chips has emerged, and Etched, judging by the size of its new round and signed contracts, ranks among the most capitalized players of this wave.

What this means

The $800 million round and $1 billion in contracts show that the market believes in a separate niche for AI inference chips — parallel to the training chip market, where Nvidia still dominates. The involvement of Jane Street and a fund connected to TSMC also signals that players outside traditional venture capital are entering the inference chip race.

Frequently asked questions

How much did Etched raise and who are the investors?

Etched raised $800 million; among the investors are trading firm Jane Street and venture fund VentureTech Alliance, which has a strategic partnership with TSMC.

How do Etched chips differ from Nvidia chips?

Etched designs chips specifically for running (inference) already-trained AI models, not for training them — unlike Nvidia GPUs, which are used at both stages.

How much are Etched's contracts signed for?

The company claims signed contracts for selling its chips worth $1 billion.