Rob Wachen
Co-Founder & President, Etched. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@robertwachen ↗LinkedIn ↗etched.com ↗
Rob Wachen is the co-founder and President of Etched, an AI semiconductor startup building specialized hardware for AI inference. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he previously co-founded Mentor Labs and the founder community Prod.
1shows
1appearances
31statements
11resolved
4supported
6contradicted
36%fully supported
Everything Rob Wachen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wachen: AI agents will outnumber human knowledge workers by 2027
“I think this is the second to last year where a majority of the workforce is going to be human. I think in 20, 27, you're going to see there's going to be more agents doing knowledge work than humans, and it's going to be extremely interesting to see what happ…”
Wachen: The Largest Token Producer Will Be the World's Most Valuable Company
“Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world.”
Wachen: AI inference will eventually make up the majority of global GDP
“I firmly believe we are on a global march of inference becoming majority of global GDP. And it may take more than 10 years, but it's going to happen.”
Wachen: The semiconductor stack is over-buffered for general-purpose use cases
“The entire semiconductors and data center industry is built on buffer. And what I mean by that is every part of the stack from the EDA tools to the power modules, to the circuit boards, to the chip design and standard cells, everything is built to be general p…”
Wachen: All AI chips in the future will be low-voltage
“And we think all AI chips in the future are going to be low voltage chips. They're going to have to cram way more flops in the same silicon area, and without thermal throttling run at way lower voltages.”
Wachen: Etched AI chip operates at under half the voltage of rivals
“We're now bringing forward our first generation of this low voltage inference technology Which is running at under half the voltage of any other AI chip.”
Wachen: Inference clusters will quickly scale to tens of thousands of chips
“And, you know, the inference side, you know, today people usually think about it as an eight chip cluster, or maybe just, you know, NVL as the scale up domain but very quickly, this is going to become thousands of chips and tens of thousands of chips.”
Wachen: Software COGS per incremental user will become high due to inference
“Like, the cost structure of every software company, the COGS is not going to be, like, zero anymore for an incremental user. It's going to be, like, quite high, and it's going to be a function of inference.”
Wachen: AI inference will become the biggest market in the world
“It feels like we are on a, like, decade march for inference to become, you know, the biggest market in the world.”
Wachen: Etched is the only startup building custom racks and chips
“We're actually, I think we're the only startup right now that's building its own rack as well as its own chips.”
Wachen: Over $1B in AI Compute Revenue Generated Every Day
“Every day there's over a billion dollars of revenue in this category, and a lot of it's inference.”
Wachen: Etched ran rack inference in 40 days versus rival's 10 months
“There is another very famous AI chip company that took 10 months to go from getting their silicon back to having them running inference in Iraq. And this was like publicly announced to their investors and it was a really big deal. We were able to do it in 40 d…”
Wachen: Etched hardware achieves 10x higher user concurrency at equal interactivity
“So when people are doing that evaluation, our hardware is going to generally be able to get you an order of magnitude more concurrency at a given level of interactivity.”
Wachen: In-House AI Chip Failure Is Not Existential for Hyperscalers or OpenAI
“Meta won't fail if MTIA fails, Microsoft won't fail if Maya fails, and OpenAI won't fail if Jalapeno fails.”
Wachen: Society Faces a Multi-Decade AI Token Supply Shortage
“We are in a new era of intelligence where the cost of producing intelligence is dramatically so much cheaper than the value of the intelligence that we are in a many year, probably many decade supply shortage of these tokens.”
Wachen: EDA tools default to freezing temperature constraints irrelevant to AI
“You know, the default configurations for a lot of these EDA tools assume that you're going to be running your chips in freezing temperatures. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an AI data center with ice in it. So, you know, we can feel pretty co…”
Wachen: Existing GPUs and TPUs are retrofitted pre-ChatGPT hardware
“Every GPU, every TPU, every AI chip that was serving these models were just, like, fundamentally built before this and are retrofit to serve these modern models.”
Wachen: Colossus charges $12/hour for Blackwells as the only 20k-cluster provider
“Why is Colossus charging 12 dollars an hour for Blackwells? It's because they're the only place you can buy 20,000 of them at once, right?”
Wachen: AI agents will soon build complete web browsers in under an hour
“I thought it was really cool months ago when Cursor published that they had
a bunch of coding agents build an entire browser from scratch in a week.
Totally nuts.
And that, that will soon happen in under an hour.”
Wachen: Codex got GPT-OSS running overnight from Etched docs alone
“And we had Codex actually get GPT-OSS running from scratch just based off of our docs completely by itself. And it did it, I think, overnight.”
Wachen: Traditional semiconductor funds missed all AI chip companies
“I think, ah, a lot of the traditional semiconductor funds missed the entire AI chip, like, all the AI chip companies.”
Wachen: Etched first-gen chip avoided Rubin supply chain by using 4nm
“And that's why actually for our first gen product, we built it on a different supply chain than the Rubens. So, you know, we're on four nanometer Rubens on three nanometer, you know, we're on a different HPM than Rubens and so forth.”
Wachen: Giant AI models will serve billions of users in a few years
“A few years from now, there's going to be giant models serving billions of users.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Rob's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Co-Founder & President, Etched | 1 | 31 | 36% 4/11 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |