Etched

“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…”

“We needed to sign an agreement with a physical design vendor, which, you know, will cost you at least 40, fifty million dollars.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And we've had dozens of people from high frequency trading join the team because they saw this philosophy too.”

“We're actually, I think we're the only startup right now that's building its own rack as well as its own chips.”

“Fundamentally, if you want to run a majority of tokens in the world, you need to do three things. You need to build a chip with the most flops, And given power budget, you need to build a chip that has the lowest latency between other chips. So the biggest sca…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Synopsis actually went ahead and let us get some of their emulators on extremely favorable terms where we pay over many years.”

“Generally, loading data is very expensive, and doing math is very cheap. And as time goes on, you'll end up finding that math gets cheaper at a rate that is faster than memory gets cheaper, due to this fundamental limit on any kind of DRAM device.”

“We took over 700 FPGAs and put the entire full reticle chip on an FPGA cluster and ran a dozen different models with our full inference stack on them before the chips came back.”

“And the following day, I get an email from TSMC saying, Gavin, I want to work with Etched. Find a way to make it happen.”

“We had people quit. That people literally were like, this problem is unsolvable, and, ah, best of luck guys.”

“We went out and shipped a dozen of our top engineers across the world to Bangalore for six months. I was there as well. I lived in Bangalore for four and a half months personally”

“When you do this sort of kernel's work, what you realize is that the math is relatively easy. But to get high speed decode, the thing that matters is data movement. Almost all the work that you do is optimizing how do you move data around a single chip or acro…”

“We realized there was one and only one way to solve it. As we had to go line up two clock signals on our chip to within 50 picoseconds. That is literally 50 trillionths of a second. And we had to go get these signals aligned to this super small granularity and…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“That the way you want this to scale is not that, oh, if I want to go serve 10 times more tokens, I buy 10 times more servers. It must be some solution where if I want to serve 10 times more tokens, then I get some economies of scale benefit with my say cluster…”

“It feels like we are on a, like, decade march for inference to become, you know, the biggest market in the world.”

“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.”

“TSMC customer service is way, way better than I have seen at any other company in any other industry. It's the kind of thing where if you say, hey, you can approve your yield by making this change, you can go make them a recommendation, and then we'll go run a…”

“Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world.”