Etched is an American semiconductor startup building Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run only one thing: transformer models. By burning the transformer architecture directly into silicon, Etched claims an 8-chip Sohu server can match the throughput of 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs on Llama-70B inference. Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, the company has raised over $625M, including a recent $500M round at a reported $5B valuation.
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, a Cupertino-based AI chip startup building the world's first transformer-specific ASIC called Sohu. A Harvard dropout and 2024 Thiel Fellow, Uberti co-founded Etched in 2022 alongside Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen after betting that transformer architecture would dominate AI for years to come. That bet has paid off spectacularly: Etched has raised over $625 million (including a $500M round in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation), and Sohu claims to run transformer inference 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 at a fraction of the cost - positioning Etched as one of the most serious challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.