Etched

Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu. Their chip, Sohu, is an ASIC that can run nothing but transformers — unlike a general-purpose GPU, everything else is stripped away. The wager is that the transformer architecture stays put long enough for fixed-function silicon to pay off. The company claims one Sohu server can replace around 160 Nvidia H100s at inference.

It is a wild bet. If the field shifts architecture again, the way it once moved from RNNs to transformers, the chip is worthless — it cannot run anything else. A $120M Series A in 2024 gave them the runway to test the thesis before the answer is in.