As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefiting enormously. Nvidia, in particu

Etched is building an AI chip that only runs one type of model

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2024-07-10 17:00:07

As generative AI touches a growing number of industries, the companies producing chips to run the models are benefiting enormously. Nvidia, in particular, wields massive influence, commanding an estimated 70% to 95% of the market for AI chips. Cloud providers from Meta to Microsoft are spending billions of dollars on Nvidia GPUs, wary of falling behind in the generative AI race.

It’s understandable, then, that generative AI vendors aren’t pleased with the status quo. A large portion of their success hinges on the whims of the dominant chipmakers. And so they, along with opportunist VCs, are on the hunt for promising upstarts to challenge the AI chip incumbents.

Etched is among the many, many alternative chip companies vying for a seat at the table — but it’s also among the most intriguing. Only two years old, Etched was founded by a pair of Harvard dropouts, Gavin Uberti (ex-OctoML and ex-Xnor.ai) and Chris Zhu, who along with Robert Wachen and former Cypress Semiconductor CTO Mark Ross, sought to create a chip that could do one thing: run AI models.

That’s not unusual. Plenty of startups and tech giants are developing chips that exclusively run AI models, also known as inferencing chips. Meta has MTIA, Amazon has Graviton and Inferentia, and so on. But Etched’s chips are unique in that they only run a single type of model: Transformers.