Asia Edition

Etched emerged from stealth on June 30, 2026, announcing $800 million raised, a working transformer-specific chip called Sohu, and over $1 billion in signed customer contracts. The startup's bet is that hardcoding the transformer architecture into silicon delivers inference performance that general-purpose Nvidia GPUs cannot match, with early benchmarks showing 500,000 tokens per second on Llama 70B versus roughly 25,000 from an equivalent H100 configuration.