Etched raises $300M Series C at a $10B pre-money valuation

At the $10B pre-money figure, the post-money valuation was $10.3B, roughly double the $5B set in December 2025. Total funding reached $1.1B. SK Hynix, a memory maker, joined alongside Jane Street and Diffusion. Etched says it has booked more than $1B in pre-orders, has made first chips through TSMC, and has full systems in testing at customers. The money is meant to move Sohu from working silicon to volume deployment. The pace has not slowed. Etched later raised $700M at a $21B valuation, after Jane Street tested and bought its Sohu hardware. That makes an early investor a paying customer. The company claims an eight-chip Sohu server can run Llama 70B at more than 500,000 tokens per second, against about 23,000 for an eight-H100 system. That figure is the company's own claim. Other inference-focused chip rounds are landing too, including Groq's $350M at a $3.5B valuation. For AI founders, inference cost per token is becoming a supplier-side contest, with investors willing to fund hardware that gives up flexibility for throughput. A transformer-only chip is a bet that architectures stay stable. Teams planning multi-year compute contracts should watch whether Etched ships at volume, and whether Nvidia's roadmap closes the efficiency gap.